The Winter Prince

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  The courtier who knelt before me was no older than I. He was dressed like Kidane, with a shamma overmantle and head cloth of closely woven linen, except that this young man’s head cloth was banded with ribbons of silver mesh.

  “This is Ityopis Anbessa,” said Kidane, “another of the brothers lionheart.”

  “Please don’t kneel,” I repeated. His formality infected everyone. Kidane and Priamos were on their feet, and Telemakos knelt on both knees with his face in his hands. What a trial it must be, I thought, to be six and not quite royal, and to have to throw yourself on the floor whenever any adult walks into the room. Father had never demanded such ceremony of me or Lleu.

  Ityopis stood up. The brothers lionheart faced each other.

  “Hornbill!” Ityopis cried in delight, and they caught each other’s shoulders and touched cheek to cheek. “I did not know you had been sent for!”

  Priamos did not meet his brother’s eyes. “I have not been sent for,” he answered. “I came here as guide and translator for the princess, but no one sent for me.”

  “And you trusted him, Princess?” Ityopis was laughing. “‘Have no trust in translators,’ that is what our uncle the emperor Caleb would have told you. Though he had Abreha in mind when he said it, I think, not Priamos Hornbill.”

  “Abreha?” I asked.

  “The self-styled king of Himyar,” Kidane said. “The victorious pretender.”

  “He who won the battle against Ras Priamos,” Telemakos supplied, the gap in his teeth making him whistle over Priamos’s name.

  “Abreha’s title is not self-styled,” Priamos said with his habitual scowl, though his voice was mild enough. “He was elected.”

  “Let’s not talk of Himyar,” Ityopis said quickly. “My fault for speaking Abreha’s name. Our mother the queen of queens will have to call me Hornbill instead of you, Priamos. Has he explained why the queen of queens names him Hornbill, Princess—”

  “Because I look like one,” Priamos interrupted, his heavy brow lowered ferociously.

  “Because his tongue will never be reined when he is nervous or excited, and lets slip a deal of nonsense that were better left unsaid.”

  I raised my own eyebrows. “Truly?”

  “Has he not yet gone off his head with temper in your presence? Perhaps you have enspelled him, Princess—”

  jusy">1C;Ityopis, keep hold of your own tongue or I will find someone to cut it out,” Priamos interrupted hotly, and said to me, “Pay no heed to this lapdog of his mother. He has always been abominably disrespectful of all his elder brothers. Sits on the emperor’s council and gets called dove, the peacemaker, by the emperor Caleb’s elder sister, our mother Candake the queen of queens! What monstrous rot!”

  Through all this exchange they had not let go of each other’s shoulders.

  “Tell me of my brothers, Peacemaker,” Priamos said. “Have you word of Mikael?”

  “He sits as ever on his cliff top at Debra Damo, reciting the tale of Daniel a hundred times a day.”

  “And Yared?”

  “Sings. They say he is devising a way to write down his music. Perhaps Yared will be released from his sequestering when he is a little older, as you and I were,” Ityopis said. “And as Hector was.”

  “And Abreha,” said Telemakos.

  His grandfather struck him. Not hard enough to call it cruel, but hard enough to hurt. Telemakos knelt again. His poor knees. He hid his face in his hands and said humbly, “I don’t know what I did that time, Grandfather. I beg your pardon.”

  Kidane sighed.

  “Ityopis has said we will not speak of Himyar anymore,” Kidane said. “Don’t just hear what people say: listen. If you listen to everything, and keep your mouth shut until someone asks you a question, you won’t offend anyone. You’ll hear more that way, as well, because you won’t be sent off in disgrace. And, God willing, you’ll learn to tell what’s spoken appropriately, and what isn’t.

  “Listen,” Kidane repeated.

  “Yes,” Telemakos said quietly. “Yes, sir.”

  And I, who had been listening carefully the whole time, realized that the pretender Abreha was also Priamos’s brother.

  Constantine sat in a room of black and green marble. He was surrounded by attendant courtiers, and had the ceremonial spear bearers of the Aksumite emperor, the negusa nagast, king of kings, at his back. One of the company, a boy of fourteen or fifteen years who wore a plain white cotton shamma and head cloth, watched me steadily and frankly, which was the first time anyone in Aksum had eyed me other than with oblique glances. And in truth I must have been a troubling sight: unadorned with gold or precious jewels, my hair plaited and pinned up simply in the way I had learned to care for it myself during my journey, my skirt patched and faded.

  Constantine rose and came forward to greet me. He was not much taller than me, and close to my age, like Priamos. His sandy hair was banded with an Aksumite head cloth; he wore a small pointed beard, also like Priamos. He took me by the hands and said, “Welcome, cousin, to the imperial city of the Aksumite peoples.”

  He spoke Latin, which meant that most there could not understand what he was saying. “My dear Goewin, you are still so very young!” he said. “How did you dare the journey from Britain? What can have brought you here? Could you not wait until next year for a husband?”

  I could not return his smile. I answered stiffly in my limping Ethiopic, so that my words should not need to be translated or told twice. “I did not come seeking a husband. I came seeking the protection of the emperor Caleb, Ella r Cy wAsbeha, who brought forth the dawn, my father’s most powerful and influential ally.”

  “The emperor could not have made that offer himself,” said Constantine. It was a bald statement of truth, lacking of sympathy or interest, and my dislike of him grew.

  “He did not,” I said patiently. “I had the invitation from Ras Priamos, the emperor Caleb’s nephew and envoy. Priamos did not expect, and neither did I, to find his emperor’s kingdom made handsel to a foreign princeling.”

  That insulted him, as it was meant to. Constantine stood pressing his lips together. Then for the first time he glanced at Priamos, who for months had been my most true and brave companion. “Priamos Anbessa,” said Constantine softly, in Ethiopic also. “What are you doing in this city?”

  The question took Priamos by surprise.

  “Make a reply,” said Constantine.

  Priamos answered reasonably, his voice low, “I could not let the princess journey alone.”

  “You were sent to Britain for an appointment that should last no less than three years. You have acted in direct defiance of your king in coming here. Was there no gratitude in you for being entrusted with such a position, after your disgrace in Himyar?”

  I could not believe Constantine was talking over my head, questioning my guide’s loyalty, without knowing why I was here. I was used to standing aside and keeping my mouth shut. But I was the high king’s daughter, and I was not used to being ignored.

  “Constantine, hear me out,” I said. “The kingship of Britain—”

  My mistake was in stubbornly trying to make myself understood in Ethiopic. I had to work hard to follow it in conversation, and I could not speak it as well as I could understand it. In Latin I could have explained myself quickly. But Constantine cut off my stumbling story, all his attention now focused on Priamos.

  “The prince Wazeb is Caleb’s chosen heir, and my ward. I will not allow him to be threatened by the grasping of minor royalty,” Constantine said. “If you so boldly defy the mandate of your uncle the emperor as his emissary in Britain, abandoning a post that many here think you did not deserve after you failed to defeat Abreha’s army, what else can you be plotting?”

  “I did not think I could be breaking my mandate in protecting the princess of Britain. But I see that I have,” Priamos answered unhappily. “I never meant to do other than serve my uncle as he bid me. I was trained to it.”

  “Well, and so
was the pretender Abreha, and that has not stood in the way of his treachery in Himyar!”

  “I am not Abreha,” said Priamos quietly.

  “Yet after him you are the eldest son of Candake the queen of queens, the eldest of Caleb’s nephews, and I find you here in violation of your commission.”

  “How am I Candake’s eldest? What of Mikael?”

  “Mikael!” Constantine laughed. “Mikael is insane.”

  “So should you be if you had spent the last thirty years shut up in the same three rooms!” Priamos burst out, in the most uncontrolled blaze of passion that I had ever seen from him.

  There was a still, terrible moment while Constantine and Priamos faced each other,ed trolle pale and dark, like a matched pair of opposing chessmen.

  Then Constantine said in a flat voice, “You are under arrest for desertion. You will submit yourself to detainment in this house, or I will have you tried for apostasy against the empire’s heir.”

  All this while I was struggling to understand the language. “Apostasy?” I asked desperately.

  “Treason,” whispered Priamos in Latin, stunned.

  “I am regent here,” Constantine went on. “I act for the king of kings Ella Asbeha, the emperor Caleb, as his viceroy Ella Amida. You stand and challenge me in open defiance of my authority.”

  Constantine spoke, as he must have known, to the strict protocol of all Priamos’s sequestered childhood and military training. Priamos, without seeming to show any kind of irony or insolence, knelt at Constantine’s feet in the deep obeisance that he had made to my father when first they met, his hands open as if in supplication.

  The boy in the white cotton cloak said suddenly, “You would be prone before your uncle the emperor.”

  “I submit to your authority,” said Priamos, and lay flat on his chest, with his face sunken against his forearms.

  Constantine gave a signal to his spear bearers. They moved to stand guard over Priamos, the bronze blades of their ceremonial spears held menacingly at his either side.

  “Ras Priamos, you may have fought against Abreha under Caleb’s orders, but you are still Abreha’s brother,” said Constantine. “Why he spared you and all your regiment is beyond my comprehension. He did not even try to ransom you. I cannot trust anyone so favored by the Himyarite pretender. My loyalty must lie with Wazeb.”

  “Your loyalty lies with me,” I interrupted in cold fury, hearing the frost in my voice as blowing straight down from the northern sea. “How dare you. How dare you stand cloaked in imperial robes not your own, in a palace not your own, with the royal spear bearers of a rival empire at your back, accusing your own sovereign’s ambassador of treachery! You were to return to Britain next spring. Even if I had not meant to recall you, you would deliberately disobey Artos in seeing this command to its completion!”

  Well, we were battling now, and openly, and not even in Latin, but in our common British dialect.

  “Is that an accusation of treason, or your own interpretation of my actions?” Constantine said, barely controlling his fury. “On whose authority do you speak?”

  “On my own,” I said. “My God! That you should be wallowing in such splendor, while your sovereign lord and the sweet prince who was to fill your position here next year, my own twin, lay bleeding on the cold fields around Camlan! I traveled four thousand miles to reach you, who have been named my father’s heir in the event of my brothers’ deaths. Do you think anything less than the total destruction of my kingdom could have brought me here?”

  Now Constantine seemed unsure how seriously to take me. “Do you mean to tell me—”

  “Artos the high king of Britain is dead,” I avowed, “and Lleu the young lion, the prince of Britain, slain in battle with him. Medraut, my father’s eldest son, should have been our regent, as you know; but he, too, is lost. The king of the West Saxons is in control of our southern ports, the queen of the Orcades is ge Ouldrasping for what is left, and both have offered bounties for my capture. Britain’s collapse is held in check by your own father and those of the high king’s comrades who survived the battle of Camlan…”

  I took a breath and thumped my fists against my forehead in despair. “Oh, God, I have not the strength to repeat all of this in Ethiopic!”

  I took another breath, trying to collect myself. Constantine and I stood face to face, but when I sought to hold his gaze he let his eyes slide away from mine, like all the people of this land.

  “My father named you his heir in the event of his sons’ deaths. Britain is yours for the taking,” I said slowly, searching for appropriate words, “though I am now loath to bless your kingship with my hand in marriage, however long we have been promised.”

  The weight of my tale struck him now, and for a moment he shut his eyes, grimacing. Then he mastered himself and said evenly, “You are upset.”

  “I mean it,” I swore, though by the terms of my father’s legacy Constantine would be king whether or not I married him. He was the high king’s eldest living nephew, and the high king’s sons were dead.

  “Would you spend your life in exile, battling against my reign, as Morgause did Artos?” Constantine asked, as though he were already crowned.

  I answered coldly, “I do not need to seduce my brother to produce a queen’s pawn, as she did when she created Medraut. I am Artos’s own daughter. Any son I bear would have a greater claim than you to Britain’s kingship.”

  “Don’t covenant your unborn children,” Constantine said contemptuously.

  “Don’t compare me to my aunt!”

  We glared at each other.

  Then Constantine gave a tired smile, and took my hands again, gently. “Forgive me, lady,” he said, speaking Ethiopic himself, so that it would be understood by all and was something of a formal apology. “Your news has shocked and dazed me, and I am taking it in ill grace. I would not have greeted you so jestingly to begin with if I had known what news you bore.”

  “How can you know what news anyone bears before he tells it?” I said, and shook off his hands.

  I glanced down at Priamos, who still lay flat on his face at our feet. I could see the gentle rise and fall of his back as he breathed; he lay quietly, not trembling or straining in any way, though the ceremonial spears biting into his ribs held him transfixed. Surely I had some authority over my own ambassador.

  “Do you release Priamos Anbessa and make apology for the ill reception you have given him. He has most steadfastly served and protected me, and the prince of Britain as well.”

  Constantine spoke to his guards. “Withdraw your spears.”

  The spearmen ceased to threaten Priamos, and he got slowly to his feet. But the guards, who had not been dismissed, remained at his sides. Priamos did not raise his eyes; he showed no trace of defiance or injury.

  “What was that all about?” the forward boy in white asked casually.

  His regal self-assurance was so like my brother Lleu’s that I realized who he must be: this was Wazeb, Caleb’s heir, whose kingdom Constantine was guarding. I noticed now that he was even crowned, after a fashion; his head cloth was boundlote: with a simple circlet of twisted grass, whose points met in a cross.

  “Artos the high king of Britain is dead,” Constantine said in Ethiopic. He faced Priamos again. “For your safe delivery of the princess of Britain you have the gratitude of two kingdoms. But I must insist on your detainment here, until such time as you can prove to me surely that you are no threat to Wazeb’s sovereignty.”

  Constantine turned to me. “And you, of course, my lady, we shall serve in any way we may, as best we can. We shall prepare you an apartment here—”

  “Thank you, but I think not,” I answered. “I have already accepted the hospitality of my brother’s dear friends in the city. I think Kidane has less claim to royalty than Ras Priamos, and I trust you will not find my hosts guilty of any secret sedition.”

  “Come see me tomorrow morning. I am up to my neck in negotiations with the Beja tribesmen
this afternoon. We can talk more privately in the morning, and decide what there is for us to do. You could meet me for the service at St. Mary of Zion, then break your fast with me. You’ll like the cathedral.”

  “All right.”

  But our trust was in shards before it ever had a chance to set.

  Other guards came in to escort Priamos out of the chamber. He nodded a farewell to me, his expression impassive. If he had tried to hold my gaze, I do not think I would have been able to look at him; I felt as though I had led him into a trap. But of course he did not try to meet my eyes. Our shared tragedy at Camlan, our conspiratorial flight from Britain, our partnered voyage, vanished like sea spray after a breaking wave.

  Telemakos was waiting in the corridor.

  “Have you met your husband? What did you think of him? Do you have to stay here longer, or will I bring you home to meet my mother now?”

  I could make no answer. I watched Priamos being led away.

  “Why is Ras Priamos under guard?”

  I managed to collect myself, and answered with bitter anger: “Because he is Abreha’s brother, as you have pointed out. Abreha was kind to him in Himyar, and Constantine therefore thinks Priamos is not to be trusted.”

  “Kind to him!” Telemakos exclaimed. “Ras Priamos was brought before Abreha naked and in chains after their battle. So say his warriors.”

  “Yes, well, there is kindness and kindness. When your enemy sends you home alive and free it counts as kindness.”

  “What did the viceroy say when you told him he was to be high king of Britain?”

  “Told me not to conceive my own nephew, like Morgause the queen of the Orcades,” I answered impulsively and inappropriately. Medraut was after all the child’s father, beloved though never known, a legend; like Odysseus to Telemakos’s namesake.

  The dark subtlety of my sarcasm was lost on Telemakos. He laughed, showing off his missing teeth. “Why would you need another nephew?” he asked. “You have me.”

  I stared at him. He was the high king’s grandson, the only child of my father’s eldest son.