This worried Telemakos. He did not want anyone to notice him. He tried to seem more cowed.
It should have been easy. There was scarcely a shred left of his shamma, which they tore apart again to make a new blindfold when the first began to disintegrate. Telemakos had never imagined he could hate a lifeless piece of cloth as much as he now hated that shamma. Because of the blindfold Telemakos was kept bound; and that meant he could never sleep comfortably, nor feed himself, nor reach to adjust the water bags when they chafed his shoulders.
Nor could he stop them when they slipped.
Telemakos could carry one full goatskin, and that was a day’s water for four men. It took all his strength to stay upright and stagger forward under this awkward weight, so to make better use of him his overseers usually loaded him with several partly emptied skins that could be evenly distributed over his shoulders. These they tied together into a makeshift harness, which one day came apart while Telemakos was waiting to be led out onto the salt.
He could not reach the slipping water bags, nor even see where they were falling, but instinctively Telemakos swung around as though he had some hope of saving them. In doing so he collided with a man who was tying amole blocks to a camel’s back. Salt and water came toppling down around them. One of the skins burst as it struck the ground, and Telemakos’s sore feet were soothed with an unexpected wash of warm water even as he heard the salt blocks shattering.
He stood frozen while the amole crashed in a heap around his ankles. One of the falling blocks grazed his wrist bone hard enough to draw blood.
People surrounded him, cursing and crying out.
“The belt’s slipped—”
“That is an hour’s work smashed to ruin!”
“There’s salt everywhere, man, who needs salt? The water wasted!”
Someone hit Telemakos across the mouth.
“Don’t do that. You’ve no authority.”
“Well, get Hara.”
Telemakos stood waiting, filled with childish dread, while they fetched the vindictive warden.
Hara was brutal. “Careless whelp! Those bars were worth more than I paid for you!” He struck Telemakos again, driving him to his knees. “And who will go without the water spilled this day, young jackal’s spawn? Eh? Too well born for work that any half-grown girl can do! Here in the desert he who cannot carry, cannot drink.”
Telemakos cowered beneath the vitriol as much as the blows, and ground his teeth together in the effort not to answer in kind. All his hope lay in seeming ignorant.
Hara made a sound as though he were dusting Telemakos’s touch from his hands. “Thunder and lightning, how am I to discipline a deaf-mute? Have this boy lashed. I hate these royal outcasts.”
It was foully unfair. Righteous anger, and despair over the lost water, made Telemakos reckless. He fought as they untangled him from the fickle harness.
They bore down on him like hunting hyenas, with terrifying swiftness. Telemakos had nursed the illusion that although he volunteered his obedience, he was still free to move and object and make his own will known. But his will counted for nothing. He could not see to aim his blows; his feet and teeth never connected with anything, and his bound arms were useless. Every hand that touched him seemed twice the size of his own, and wielded thrice the strength. They overpowered him as easily as they might have held off a toddling infant, and much more cruelly.
They tore off his ragged shamma, and fixed his loosely bound hands tight together behind his back; then one of them managed to shove thick fingers into the scant space between Telemakos’s throat and the band of gold he wore, and gripping the collar as though Telemakos were an unruly hound, the man heaved him across a stretch of burning gravel and hurled him against a wall of salt slag. Telemakos was so choked and stunned by this that he could scarcely breathe. He did not make a sound during the beating that followed, only because they did not release his throat until it was over.
When they let go of him at last, he sank to his knees, battling the need to weep aloud. After a little while this gave him focus, and he sniffed and sniveled abjectly in the blazing sunlight until his bonds were loosened slightly and he was set back to work. He was given no drink through all that afternoon.
Later, when he lay with his feet ironbound in the row of sleeping prisoners, Telemakos cried again, silently and to himself, for a long time.
No one will treat you gently if you are caught.
Telemakos did not mind hardship, and he was not usually afraid of being hurt. But he was beginning to thirst for kindness more desperately than he thirsted for water.
X
THE LAZARUS
—tight in his claws a struggling dove, and he ripped its feathers out and they drifted down to earth …
15:589–91
HIS HAIR WAS GROWING back. Telemakos could tell, because people suddenly began to touch his head, as if for luck, like the street children of Aksum. It came out of nowhere: when he was waiting for his shoulders to be hung about with water skins, when he was eating, sometimes when he was allowed a few moments to sit resting with his head against his knees between trips out to the salt. Light fingers brushed against his scalp and no one ever said anything. Eventually he could feel the slight give of the new hair as the surreptitious fingers swept over it.
There was not a thing Telemakos could do about his hair, except to hope that it would not be recognized or held against him.
Caravan upon caravan of traders arrived and left without Telemakos’s being parceled off to them, and he was in an agony of confusion as to what this could mean. Had they not been willing to pay whatever exorbitant price Hara asked for him, or had he not been offered to them? None of the bands had included the man Telemakos was waiting for, so he tried to be thankful that he had not been shipped off already. He suspected and hoped, and feared so cravenly he grew ashamed of himself, that Hara was waiting for the Lazarus even as Telemakos was, and meant to offer Telemakos to him and none other.
His tracker’s intuition was dead on target. It was in fact more than two months since Telemakos had left Adulis, and a little less than two months since he had first come to the mines in Afar. Telemakos was one day stripped of his baggage and led to a place he had not been before, but which he knew existed: the enclosure where the foremen and warden camped. Telemakos was taken inside one of the shelters; he could tell he was inside by the shade, though it was not much cooler than without. It was anyway singularly different from the punishing legwork he had grown used to, and it set his nerves on edge.
“What is that?” said an oily, disdainful voice in accented Greek. “What is it?’
The man stank with a sour animal reek. Telemakos could not identify it, his sense of smell dulled by salt and thirst. It made him think of baboon.
The warden’s voice answered, “I have an idea he is the one we call the Harrier.”
I am lost, thought Telemakos in horror, and never moved.
“You are suspicious of everything,” said the baboon.
“I am the Scorpion. That is my job.”
“Scorpion!” the other repeated with deep scorn. “That is what you call yourself, at any rate. What makes you think this small, frightened thing is the emperor’s most elusive informer?”
“Two reasons. One is that my own agents tell me the Harrier is no longer operating in Adulis; and the other is that in every caravan that has come from Adulis since the boy arrived, there has been some character asking about him, or offering to buy him, without knowing for certain he is here. One Afar band tried more than once. So I thought I should wait and show him off to you, before I sell him. Indeed, if you want him for yourself—”
Telemakos knew, in that moment, that he stood before the Lazarus. This was the man he had come to find. But the baboon, the Lazarus, could see him, and Telemakos could not see the Lazarus.
“Where did you get it?” asked the slow, disdainful voice.
“The first camel train from Adulis brought him. They picked
him up on the Salt Road; he came to them out of nowhere in the desert, well on his way to dying of thirst, and begging them for water. They told me he is deaf and dumb, and he does seem so. They thought he was fleeing a sequestering.”
“That white hair….” said the baboon, thoughtfully. “The British ambassador had hair like that, ten years ago and more.”
Telemakos stood waiting passively, his heart thundering.
“They may be right about the sequestering, then,” the baboon continued, still thoughtful. “None of the daughters of the queen of queens would want that bastard thing lurking about the New Palace while she tried to find a husband.”
It made Telemakos want to laugh. It made him want to weep. His cursed hair might save him.
There was a noise of water poured, or beer perhaps, and the sound of the men drinking.
“If it’s an imperial bastard I will have nothing to do with it.” The baboon paused, and drank again. “I dare not draw attention to myself in Gebre Meskal’s court. But if it is an emissary of his….” He spoke slowly. “If it is the Harrier, indeed I do want it.”
Telemakos was beginning to feel sick with listening to these men toss his fate from hand to hand like a shining stone, while he must stand quietly pretending he could hear none of it.
“Why do you bandage its face?” the baboon asked then.
“The men he arrived with kept him blind so he would not learn the way, and I have kept him blind so he would not know me.”
“That is a blindfold, then, not a bandage?” the baboon asked. “I should blind that thing for good, if it were mine, and have done with any fuss.”
“He will be worth more whole.”
“Blindfolds slip. My camel man could blind it for you very neatly. He does it with a pin; it scarcely bleeds. Or you might sew its eyes shut.”
Telemakos had the impression that the man was trying to draw a reaction from him, and did not move. He had spent two months playing at being deaf and dumb; he was not going to let the fear of a threat betray him.
“I will not do that,” said Hara firmly. “I do not dare that unless I know who he is. The Afar who tried to buy him insisted he is meant as a wedding gift for the bride of Ahamado, the son of their negus. They will not want him blinded.”
“Well,” said the Lazarus, “it is your own neck on the line. It does not know my name, Master Scorpion. But if it can hear, it most assuredly knows yours. Have you proof it cannot speak? Have you tested it?”
“The boy has never spoken. We whipped him once, and he did not cry out.”
“Take this little knife and slip it between the creature’s finger and fingernail. That will make it cry out, if it has a voice.”
In his mind, Telemakos snatched frantically at images to hold against his heart, some way to endure and survive this test without making a sound; and his mind gave him again the caracal, stretching its amputated paws in the sun.
The warden said, “It is your knife.”
“I will not touch that thing,” said the Lazarus with disdain.
One of them, Hara, Telemakos supposed, gently took hold of his right hand. Telemakos stood still. He should not seem to know what was about to happen. He clasped the man’s hand warmly in return, as though responding to affection.
The warden forced a sharp, thin blade beneath the nail of Telemakos’s little finger.
Telemakos did not scream. He hissed in the back of his throat, like a cat, while the warden held firmly to his hand, twisting the blade as he pulled it out. Telemakos fell to his knees and sank his face against the ground, coughing and gasping.
The one who was the Lazarus said, “Do it again. Try the next finger.”
God help me, Telemakos thought in blind panic, he is going to tear through all my fingers until I scream. And if I scream, I am lost, lost. They are so close to me, so close, and I am utterly alone—
The warden knelt by him and took up his hand again. Someone on the other side of the shelter broke into sobs.
The Lazarus snapped suddenly in Noba, “Yesaka, go outside if you must snivel.”
Telemakos, huddled in a quivering heap and waiting for the next fearful test, was coolly aware then of two things. One was that the Lazarus was a native Noba speaker; and the other was that someone close by felt such pity for him that he was weeping. This seemed deeply important; this and the caracal.
“I wish you would do this yourself,” Hara muttered.
“I wish the Authority would deliver the licenses himself,” said the Lazarus. “But my childhood friend sits on the emperor’s council, so he is above me, and I am above you. Test that thing again. Slice its nail off.”
The warden prised up another of Telemakos’s fingernails.
Telemakos fought. He spat and kicked and managed to sink his teeth into Hara’s arm, and the knife tore a shallow scratch up the back of Telemakos’s hand as the warden pulled away from him, cursing blackly in Ethiopic. Hara stood up and aimed a vicious kick into Telemakos’s ribs. Telemakos choked and retched noiselessly at his feet.
The Lazarus sighed. “I suppose it is mute.” He sounded relieved. “All right. Go on and sell it, if you like,” he said. “But do not be fool enough to let it stay in Afar. Pack it off to Himyar with the next salt shipment, and it will never haunt you. I tell you this, Hara-called-Scorpion, if that thing sees me I will have its tongue cut out, whether or not it is mute, and its hands off too, and be damned to what it is worth. You would still be wise to glue its eyes shut, at the least. Use sugar paste or cosmetic jelly.”
“Sugar paste!” The warden gave a bark of bitter laughter. “From my great unlimited supply of sweet almond confection, no doubt!”
“Use animal fat, then. Mix it with grit and splintered salt; then the thing will never dare to wipe its eyes.”
“Yes, all right.” Hara paced away and yelled in Ethiopic, “Minda! Get this mongrel’s whelp out of here.”
Footsteps came near him again. Minda, or another, put a hand beneath Telemakos’s arm to encourage him to his feet. Telemakos refused to move. His collapse was real enough, but he was also desperate for some clue to the Lazarus’s identity.
“Get up, boy!”
His name, his name, his name! The city where he lives, the name of his house, the name of his wife, the name of his camel, anything!
“Minda, you donkey,” said the warden, “lift him. He does not hear.”
“You’re right about it being royal,” said the oily, disdainful voice of the Lazarus. “It’s shiftless as a mule, isn’t it? I expect it thinks it should be eating salt, like a millionaire, not cutting it.”
Then in fury and hatred Telemakos very nearly tried to rub the blindfold off against the ground. If he could only see him, just once, he would know him again. One glimpse: It would be worth losing his tongue to be able to denounce this greed-driven, stinking sadist.
But the thought of losing his hands made him quail. He could not bring himself to do it. And while Telemakos hesitated he was dragged to his feet, led out of the shelter and away from the enclosure, and he could think of no reason why he and the Lazarus would ever be brought together again. He had failed. He was a coward, and he had failed.
He was made to sit and to wait, and then someone unwound the blindfold. Telemakos opened his eyes.
The salt was blinding. Everything was white. It was like staring into the sun. Telemakos saw nothing, nothing but the unbearable light, before he clenched his eyes shut against the pain and shock. Someone held his head still while another wiped handfuls of gritty, stinking grease over his face. Desperate, then, Telemakos tried to open his eyes again, but hard fingers pressed against his eyelids, and the fatty sand slipped between his lashes. Then the dreaded, hated cloth was wound about his head again. Another strip off his shamma was tied around his bleeding fingers.
“Did you see his eyes?”
“They’re blue.”
“He’s a little goblin. I wish Hara would get rid of him.”
That night Telema
kos wept bitterly, as he always did before he slept, only now if he had any tears they were stopped by the filthy, stinging grease that matted his lashes together and glued his eyelids shut. He had come so close he could have touched the man he had been sent to find, and still he did not know his face or his name. Thirst and isolation were slowly killing him. And where were the emperor’s other players, where were the ranks of chessmen Gebre Meskal had promised him, where was the army of warriors who would fight to defend him with their lives?
Telemakos lay bound and mute and blind, weeping without tears. His dry lips burned with the taste of salt.
XI
LIGHT AND WATER
“Let me go back to my own country now. The heart inside me longs for home at last.”
15:71–72
BEHIND THE BLINDFOLD, THE grit worked its way into his eyes. They itched and smarted so incessantly that Telemakos thought he would lose his mind. He struggled against his bonds until his wrists bled, but he could not reach his face.
This torment became his whole world. He could think of nothing else; he lost all track of time. He lived in an infinite, isolate, lightless hell.
When he tried to figure afterward how long this lasted, Telemakos could never match his impression of it with the real time that had passed. It could have been as long as two weeks; it might have been as little as three days. It seemed to go on for months. But not long after the Lazarus’s visit, against the Lazarus’s advice, Hara sold Telemakos to the persistent band of Afar who wanted him as a wedding gift.
Again he was unaware that the transaction was being made, and he was startled out of the solitary, nightmare drudgery when he was effortlessly swung aloft in someone’s arms and carried over a little distance. Telemakos did not give a blind damn where they were taking him. His knees and ankles had lately begun a persistent, piercing ache, echoed dully in wrist and elbow, which made it an immense relief to be given even a few seconds’ rest.
“That young cur will never make a servant,” Hara’s voice commented. “He’s already a runaway.”
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