Medraut stabbed the air with a vicious finger, pointing at Goewin.
“Oh, you are punishing me already,” Goewin snarled at him. “I will be sick if you make me watch this any longer. His wounds are clean. Go to bed!”
Telemakos slept in his mother’s room, cradled in Turunesh’s arms like a toddler, until he was warm again.
They would not let him out of the house until the scratches began to heal. After two weeks Telemakos grew bored. He sat on the floor at his mother’s feet while Helena chattered about her grandchildren. Telemakos should meet them, Helena said; it would keep him out of trouble to have companions his own age. Telemakos sat on the floor at Goewin’s feet, poring over the maps they had made together. He asked his father to show him how to use a crossbow.
He wondered about the Lazarus. He did not think it was any more real a name than the Authority, although both clearly referred to real people. The men in the mint had spoken the words as if they were titles in a special language.
“What is a Lazarus?” he asked Goewin.
“Someone who has escaped death. Lazarus is a man who dies and comes to life again, even from the grave.”
“A ghost?”
“Not a ghost. A man alive. Christ restores him to life. It’s in the Book of John, I think. I’ll find it for you. Would you rather read Greek or Ethiopic?”
“Oh, Ethiopic, please.”
Once Telemakos knew the story he could not get it out of his head. He was struck by how dearly the biblical Lazarus was loved, how his sisters and neighbors wept for him, how his friend Jesus went back to his aid even though it put his own life in danger.
“What on earth are you doing?” Goewin asked Telemakos, coming into the cartographer’s office late at night. “We put you to bed two hours ago.”
“I wanted to see if the Salt Road is mapped.”
It was the third time in the week that he had started from sleep in terror. He had had his fill of lying in the dark, wide awake and quaking.
“It’s nearly midnight, Telemakos.”
“I keep dreaming about Lazarus, about the dead man when he comes out of the tomb. I hate that part. ‘His hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth.’”
He drew in a sharp breath, hearing his own voice speak aloud the words that were haunting him. “I cannot stop thinking about it.”
Telemakos almost could feel his aunt’s sharp, intelligent eyes boring into the top of his head as he bent over the unrevealing sketch of the Salt Desert. The page showed little more than a line of ink struck across fanciful lumps that might be mountains.
“But that is a moment of joy and wonder,” Goewin said quietly, “not horror. That is the moment when his friend saves his life. Remember what Jesus tells them? ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”
Telemakos said, “I have an idea how to find him.”
“Who?”
“The Lazarus.”
Goewin said nothing for a long moment. Then she murmured, “Your father will not like this, will he?”
She slid the projection of Afar from beneath his hand. “Save it for morning, Telemakos.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “There is a better map than this, but I will have to ask for it. It gives the landmarks and their alignment with the stars.”
The monsoon was coming to an end. The winds were about to change. One day when the morning haze smelled of the sea, Medraut and Goewin stood near Telemakos in the archon’s practice yard as he wrestled with his father’s crossbow.
Goewin said in a low voice, “I want to send Telemakos to Afar.”
It had taken Goewin a week to draw up the courage to speak to Medraut, Telemakos knew. But the winds would change any day, and then there would be no time.
“There is one man who is the key, the link in the illegal salt market. The smugglers call him the Lazarus. The only thing we know about him is that he’s going to inspect the mines in Afar in the coming season. I want to send Telemakos to Afar to find him out.”
Medraut gestured for her to continue. There were three hundred miles of desert between Adulis and Afar’s distant borders. It was so impossible a journey that Medraut listened politely, incredulous at the suggestion of sending Telemakos across that barren country.
“He’ll travel with a caravan, for his own safety, but not with their knowledge. He’ll shadow them. They’ll help him set a pace and find water, and show him the way. He’ll have to carry his own water and any food he might need beyond what he can hunt.”
Medraut stared at her as though she were insane.
“He’ll have to wait at the quarry until this smuggler arrives, then return with another caravan.”
Medraut stood as a statue, his brows lowered. He looked as though he might kill something if he moved. Telemakos had never seen him so tense.
“We won’t do this without your permission, Medraut,” Goewin said.
Medraut touched Telemakos’s shoulder to make him put down the bow and stand still. Then Medraut held up his left hand to Goewin, so that she must look at the stiff, arthritic fingers and the scars across the back of his hand.
She shook her head in bewilderment, but said nothing, as though infected by his silence.
Medraut held his hand out to her, palm down.
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the ruined fingers with his other hand.
“Morgause did that,” Goewin said. “I reminded you, not long ago.”
Medraut nodded assent, his eyes blazing, and turned away from Goewin a little, and pulled his shamma down over his shoulder to lay bare four ragged, pale scars like claw marks across his back.
“And that. I know!”
And then Medraut pulled the hair back from his neck to show her another set of claw marks, and he pointed to a tiny flaw in his cheek where the skin was shiny and smooth and his beard did not grow, and then he laid bare a terrible place along his inner forearm where his flesh had long ago been slashed and stitched and badly burned.
Goewin cried out, “I know what she did to you! I know what she did to Lleu! I know how inhuman she was! What has it to do with anything, today, here in quarantined Adulis at the Aksumite new year; what has it to do with Telemakos?”
Medraut took one of Goewin’s hands, roughly and angrily, and laid it over the appalling scars on his arm. Then he took her other hand and laid it on Telemakos’s head.
“Oh, I would not!” Goewin whispered. “I would not—I would not use him as my minion, I did that once, wrongly, and I swore I never would again. Not to coerce him, not without his willing consent—not for myself! Not to gain power for myself, as Morgause did Lleu! As you did Lleu!”
Medraut threw off her hands and turned away in a gale of fury. He pressed one fist against his forehead as if he were trying to stop his head from exploding.
“How can I make you understand, Medraut?” Goewin said fiercely. “I know how dear Telemakos is to you. God knows. He is dear to me as well. But we are battling plague. Telemakos may save all Aksum, if we let him.”
Telemakos said in a small voice, “Ras Meder, I want to do it. I thought of it myself.”
He touched his father’s arm.
“I need you to take me into the wilderness,” Telemakos said. “I need you to show me what to do, how to live. When you are sure of me, I’ll go ahead on my own.”
Telemakos picked his way to the window in his bedroom. The floor was piled with satchels, quivers, water bags that Medraut had specially made and tailored to fit a child, sandals, and shammas of varying thicknesses; three different bows were lined along the wall beneath the window. Telemakos knew which one he was going to take, but his father disagreed and had yet to approve his choice. On the windowsill lay flint and tinder, needle and thread, an assortment of small hunting knives.
“I’m not taking the flint,” said Telemakos. “I won’t be able to build a fire when I’m with the caravan.”
“You take the flint,” Goewin said firmly. She was sitting on the floo
r, weighing and testing the shammas. “I know you won’t make a cooking fire, but if you get lost or hurt, fire may be your only way to call for help. Take it. It won’t add much to your pack.”
Telemakos moved the flint to one side, adding it to the list in his head. “Do you know what the smugglers call me? Well, not me, it’s what they call the one who discovered the false sentries at Gabaza. They don’t know it’s me. They call me Harrier. I love that! And they have another name for me, do you know what they call me among the docks—”
Telemakos could not speak this aloud without laughing at it. “I am—I am—” He leaned his face against the window frame, shaking with laughter. “The Python,” he managed to gasp.
Goewin did not laugh.
“I, the Python!” Telemakos repeated. “Oh, go on, laugh.”
Goewin said seriously, “It worries me to hear you mock them.”
“It is funny, Goewin.”
“It is, a little,” she agreed. “But it means they hate and fear you, and I do not like that at all.”
She looked up at him, then, and smiled a little. “Do you know what we call you?” she asked softly. “Gebre Meskal’s special name for you is ‘sunbird.’ Little sunbird, so bright and energetic, so small it can hide in a flower. This will be my next message to the emperor: The sunbird is flying to Afar.”
She touched the floor beside her. “My sunbird, sit here by me a minute. I want to talk to you.”
He made his way carefully around the equipment spread over the floor and sat cross-legged beside her, his hands on his knees.
“Do you understand what they will do to you if they take you, and they think you are a spy?”
Telemakos closed his eyes for half a moment, his heart fluttering. What he thought of in that moment was not himself, but the black caracal: how it had stretched so languidly in the sun, flexing its mutilated paws, trying to knead the ground with claws that were no longer there.
He opened his eyes and answered in a low voice, “I think I do.”
“I don’t want to scare you,” Goewin said. “But I don’t want to betray you, either, by sending you all unwitting into hell. No one will treat you gently if you are caught. Only if they discover you are a spy, they will—they will deal bitterly with you, and show you no mercy. They will—” She faltered, her pale face oddly gray. She said abruptly, “They will break you open like a bird’s egg.”
Telemakos looked down at his hands. The thorn marks had nearly gone.
“Now, listen, Telemakos. You may be caught,” Goewin said, her voice low and passionate. “You may be caught, but you must not be discovered, do you understand? No one must ever guess why you are there, or learn your name. Your hope will lie in making your captors think you are something else. An escaping exile, say, or a bond servant. I have thought hard about this, and if you will agree, I would like to mark you, in a way. You know your father’s tattoo, how he uses it to tell people of his skill?”
She paused.
“Yes,” he said.
“In Britain the Saxon invaders mark their bondsmen with a thrall ring, an iron band about their necks. My brother was so bound after the battle of Camlan, before he died. I want to band your neck like this, but in gold, not in iron. No one will know what you are this way, but if you are seen, they will know you are royal or royal property, and maybe that will make them think again before they harm you. I thought of just a gold chain or a torque; either of those would be easier for you to wear, but then it might look as though you had stolen it. This will have to be fixed on you at an anvil, and taken off the same way.”
“All right,” he said readily.
“Won’t you mind?”
“It won’t hurt, will it? Why should I mind?”
“It is a badge of servitude.”
“It’s only a disguise.”
“It will not be a disguise,” said Goewin. She clasped one of his slim brown hands between her white ones. “I am marking you as mine.”
The winds changed. The new year brought Adulis the fresh air of the sea, blowing bright summer to the highlands.
His mother took Telemakos to the goldsmith’s where the ring was fastened around his neck. No one but she could take him without attracting attention or being recognized. Telemakos had to pretend he was her servant. In truth, it was Turunesh who had to carry out the greater pretense, as she explained to the smith the nature of the work that was required; Telemakos himself spoke no word throughout the ordeal, except at the end, when he raised his head from the anvil and put up his hands to feel the thick collar that was locked about his throat. His mother asked then, in a low voice, “Does that hurt? Will it raise a blister? Is it too heavy?”
“I’m all right,” Telemakos said, and knelt with his head bowed before her. “My lady.”
Turunesh touched his hair gently. “Come then; let’s go home.”
In the dark before dawn on the day Telemakos left Adulis, Turunesh cut off his hair and carefully shaved his scalp clean. It was the last way they could disguise him.
“I wouldn’t take care of it anyway,” he murmured, thinking his mother needed solace.
“It will grow back,” she answered calmly.
When she had finished, she kissed the top of his smooth skull. Goewin kissed him as well, on either cheek. Then she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched the gold band at his throat. “Ready?” she said.
“I’m ready.”
Telemakos set out from the governor’s house feeling strange and not himself, with the hard gold pressing at his neck and his head bare and sleek. Medraut paced silently at his side. They were southbound on the Salt Road before the sun rose.
In a way it was the most exhilarating outing his father had ever made with him. Medraut, testing Telemakos, let him do everything. Telemakos chose the way; he found the water; he set their camp; he caught their food. The land immediately south of Adulis was harsh and rocky, but not barren. Low acacia thorn trees grew everywhere, and reeds like grass, and aloe. Game was plentiful. The wayward rivers were full of catfish and crocodile. Even when the land grew less forgiving, Telemakos was still able to shoot tough little sandgrouse and occasional gazelle.
Telemakos and Medraut traveled a little away from the road. They would stay together as far as the last well before the Salt Desert, and then they would wait for a caravan, which Telemakos would continue with alone.
Once, coming to the top of a rise, Medraut shielded his eyes and pointed east. At the edge of the plain lay the first of the salt flats. White as the moon, dazzling as the sun, the salt stretched like a shining sea before a rim of jagged black mountains.
“It looks like snow,” Telemakos said.
Medraut turned to stare down at him.
“It snows in the Simien Mountains sometimes. You can see it from Aksum.”
Medraut ground his fists into his eyes to rub out the brightness of the salt. He touched Telemakos’s shoulder lightly to set him walking again.
After a week they were well away from anywhere. All that told them this land was inhabited were the waidellas, the stone monuments to the Afar dead that littered the increasingly barren landscape. It was chilling at night. When dark fell, Medraut pointed toward the stars, and Telemakos told him their names and drew their paths in the dust, until Medraut was satisfied that his son was able to find his way by night as well as by day. In this empty place Medraut let Telemakos build a fire, and Telemakos was glad that Goewin had made him take the flint. He touched the gold band at his throat, remembering her kiss.
Telemakos was cold. He crouched by the fire with his knees drawn up close to his chest, his hands in tight fists beneath his chin. Medraut held out an arm so that Telemakos might sit against his shoulder; Telemakos curled himself into the hollow between his father’s arm and chest. Medraut pulled his shamma around them both, and Telemakos closed his eyes. Warm now, and happy in this wasteland with his father guarding but not guiding him, Telemakos fell asleep.
He woke in the deep of nig
ht to the sound of Medraut’s voice. His father was muttering to himself in Latin:
“What makes you shiver so? Get up. You’ve no cloak. You’ll freeze. Don’t, don’t, ah, don’t cry. You cling to me so—do you still trust me, after all this?”
Telemakos could almost believe his father was awake. He was desperate, desperate for Medraut to be speaking to him. He wound his arms about Medraut’s neck and whispered in his father’s ear, “I have always trusted you.”
“Little brother—” Medraut murmured, his voice anguished. “I can’t. I can’t kill you. I love you.”
Medraut was not talking to Telemakos. Medraut was lost in a dead British winter with his dead British brother.
Telemakos buried his face in his father’s shoulder and sobbed, very quietly, because it was so unfair. Medraut reached up to touch Telemakos’s shaven head, as if to soothe him. The long fingers fluttered in bewilderment when they found no hair to gentle there. But Medraut did not wake up.
They arrived at the desert well and stopped for several days, hidden in a camp among the red rocks above the water. At last there came the caravan Telemakos was waiting for. He spotted the camels when they were still nearly a mile off, a train of black spots lurching against the skyline where the road crested a ridge.
“I’m going to fill my water bag before they get here,” Telemakos said. He scrambled down the slope. The well was deep; you had to climb down a series of wooden ladders to reach the bottom. But the water was good, and surprisingly cold. Telemakos filled his skin and climbed back to Medraut.
They knelt and watched together as the caravan arrived. It was small, no more than fifty camels. The men climbed down into the well and tossed up jars and skins of water. They watered their camels, rested, built a fire, baked injera. At last they began to lead the camels on through the rocky desert. Telemakos waited until they were some distance away before he followed.
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