His ribs and throat and shoulder slowly began to heal. His arm began to rot.
Two weeks after the accident, they drugged him utterly senseless for half a day so that they could cut out the pieces of him that were going moldy. After that he was so pathetic for a few days that he was able only to sip broth fed to him by Goewin in endless, patient spoonfuls. But by the end of the month he could feed himself, and he went four whole days without running a fever.
“I am minded to allow you visitors,” his father said. “Your friend Sofya has been battering at your door for the last three weeks, trying to get past me. Would you like to see Sofya?”
“I want to go home,” Telemakos said.
At the end of the week his father was so tired of listening to his pleading that at last they took him back to his own bedroom.
They made him endure another three days of proving he was not at risk of fever before they brought his baby sister in to him for five minutes. She was asleep. Their mother, Turunesh, stood just inside Telemakos’s bedroom door with the baby snuggled tightly over her stomach in a wide swathe of fabric. Telemakos could see nothing of his sister but the top of her head, a startling shock of loose, shining bronze curls. He could not see her, but while Turunesh stood there, he could smell her: an unfamiliar baby smell, of new milk turning sour, and starch, and herb-scented oil, and sandalwood.
“I’m sorry you can’t see her face, my love,” Turunesh said. “All is misery when she’s awake.”
They had not given her a name yet.
“She smells good,” Telemakos said. “What will we call her?”
His mother rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. We haven’t had a chance to talk.” She turned to go out, and said over her shoulder, “I’ll see if Goewin will take her. Then I can come back and sit with you awhile.”
“Just sit anyway,” Telemakos said. “The baby can’t bother me when she’s asleep.”
“She’ll wake up if I sit,” Turunesh said. “And then none of us will have any peace till evening.”
They let him have other brief glimpses of the baby over the next week, but they never let her get close to him, and he never saw her with her eyes open. Then one night he woke up feeling hot and sick, and he could smell the decay starting in his arm again. After that there were no more visits from the baby. Medraut and the emperor’s physician, Amosi, spent most of a day repeating the operation of a month ago, until there was so little left of Telemakos’s arm it made him sick to his stomach to look at it.
Amosi came back two days later to examine the wounds, and thinking Telemakos to be insensible because his eyes were closed, said frankly to Telemakos’s father: “Look at this—half his shoulder gone, bone laid bare! This will be septic again before the week is out. You are making your half-grown son endure torture I would not inflict on a grown man! With each effort to save his arm, you risk stopping his heart. Take the arm off and be done with it!”
“I will not,” Medraut answered, his voice tight with fury and worry. “I will not take his arm off.”
After the second operation, Telemakos began to have nightmares. He woke up screaming more often than the baby did. Medraut took to spending every third or fourth night in the monastery above the city because it was the only way he could stay alert enough to give Telemakos the attention he needed.
Telemakos screamed himself awake in the middle of one night.
“Do not, do not, oh, SAVE ME!”
He opened his eyes in panic. Even awake he could not move.
Goewin was sitting beside him. There was a blue-and-white ceramic oil lamp on the floor at her feet and a shamma shawl over her lap, as if she had already been there for some time.
“So, so, so,” she murmured soothingly, and rocked back and forth in her chair, but she did not reach to touch him. “Telemakos,” she said, her voice full of unhappiness, “tell me what you dream, my love.”
He lay sobbing and did not answer.
“Sometimes if you tell a bad dream aloud, it doesn’t seem so terrible,” she said, still rocking her knees gently to and fro. “Your father used to write his down. He spent an entire winter chronicling his nightmares, just before our father’s estate at Camlan was destroyed, and he let me read them, too.”
In his sleep, Telemakos had thought himself surrounded by the baboonlike stench of Anako the salt smuggler, and it bewildered him, on waking, to find the air full of sandalwood.
“All right,” Telemakos whispered, ready to try anything. “All right. It’s the men in Afar. At the salt mines last summer, when the smugglers caught me, I pretended I was mute. They thought I must be hiding something, so they tried to make me scream, to see if I could talk. That part was real.”
Goewin closed her eyes, her knees swaying. Telemakos had never given her much detail about what had happened to him in Afar.
“In the dream they know I can talk, and they want to know who sent me. That’s all he asks, Anako, the ringleader, again and again: Who sent you? And I mustn’t answer. And every time he asks and I don’t answer, he tells the other one, the warden at the salt mines, to drive a nail through my arm with a hammer. And he does. And—”
The fever made Telemakos feel as though his head were in flames. He whispered through his teeth.
“The warden’s name was Hara, but he called himself Scorpion. I don’t know what he looked like. He kept me blindfolded the whole time I was there because he didn’t want me to see him. In the dream he has no face. And he has—he hasn’t—he has no hands. He has a scorpion’s pincers instead of hands. He holds his hammer in these pincer fingers. They ask me their question again and again and pound the nails into me, until my arm is full of nails. If I ever answer them, if I tell them what they want to know, they’ll stop.”
“What wakes you up?” Goewin asked quietly, her eyes still closed.
“I answer them,” Telemakos whispered. “I tell them you sent me. And then Anako dusts his hands and turns away, and tells the scorpion with no face to hammer a nail through my heart. Then I start screaming and wake myself up.”
Goewin wiped her eyes angrily with the back of one hand, smoothing the shamma over her knees with the other.
“Anako will never come back to Aksum,” she said. “He may already be dead of plague. Your own command sent him into exile.”
She added fiercely, “Don’t answer him, my sunbird.”
“The infection’s coming back,” Telemakos whispered.
“How do you know?”
“I can smell it.” He sighed, his sigh a whisper also, like dry leaves rustling. “I wish—”
He did not yet have the courage to speak his wish aloud, nor did he believe that anyone around him would have the courage to act on it.
The shamma in Goewin’s lap began to squirm and whimper. Telemakos craned his neck and saw the shining bronze of his sister’s hair, and one tiny fist the same fair brown as his own hands. The whimper rose to a wail.
“Hush, hush, you’ll wake the house, you noisy little hoot owl,” Goewin crooned. She stood up and hoisted the wailing bundle over her shoulder, jigging her gently up and down. She said softly, “Come walk with me in the garden, my owlet.” She held the baby against her with one arm, and with the other she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched Telemakos’s sound shoulder as her goodnight to him. Telemakos watched with longing and envy as Goewin carried his sister out of his bedroom.
Sunlight streamed through his window all the next day, dazzling him. Goewin came back in the afternoon and set a round glass bowl of colored water on his windowsill. She turned to look at him.
“Summer has come, Telemakos,” she said sadly. “The fields are gold with Meskal daisies.”
“What is that for?” he asked, nodding at the bowl.
“It’s bait,” Goewin said. “I got the idea from Gedar’s wife Sesen, across the street. Wait and see what it catches.”
Telemakos watched it glowing like a giant ruby on hi
s windowsill over the next few days, as his fever rose and the nightmare nails through his arm bit at him so severely that he could not eat and could not sleep. Then it became too much of an effort to turn his head that way. He lay between sleep and waking, staring at the lions carved into the coffered ceiling, thinking about nothing. There was no room in his mind for any thought beyond the driving agony that had once been his left arm. He began to wish only that he would hurry up and die and get it over with.
The morning after it became too much effort for Telemakos to speak, Goewin did not go out to the New Palace. She sat by his side, not fussing with his dressings, not pacing, not weeping. The baby wailed sadly to herself in another room. They still had not bothered to give her a name.
Goewin got up quietly and went out to see to her.
III
ATHENA
WHEN GOEWIN CAME BACK she was jigging the little squirming, bronze-tipped bundle over her shoulders. She stopped suddenly in the doorway and hissed in a delighted whisper, “Oh, Telemakos, look at the window!”
There was a malachite sunbird perching on the edge of the bright bowl, its thin, curved bill just touching the surface of the honeyed water. Its wings shone iridescent emerald. It sipped there fearlessly, as if there were no one in the room.
“Goewin,” Telemakos said, “I need you to do a thing for me.”
They were the first words he had spoken in more than a day, and what he said then had been whispered. Now his voice suddenly sounded normal again, clear and determined.
“Are you better this morning?” Goewin asked in surprise.
“Nothing hurts anymore. I feel better,” Telemakos said. “I’m not better. I’m dying.”
Goewin stood silent for a moment, jogging the baby against her shoulder.
“I want my arm taken off,” Telemakos said. “Make my father do it.”
She answered fiercely, “Yes. All right.”
“If Ras Meder won’t do it himself, then get Amosi.”
“All right. Give me an hour. I’ll get your mother to sit with you.”
She turned to obey him, almost immediately.
“Wait!” Telemakos cried softly. “Goewin, wait. Please let me see the baby.”
The sunbird raised its head and began to preen, balancing on the rim of the bowl with its long tail, a blaze of green above the crimson water.
“Please,” Telemakos begged. “Put her down over here, on my right. I don’t mind if she cries. I want to see her.”
Goewin laid his sister gently at his side.
The baby looked up at him without whimpering. Her hair gleamed with the metallic sheen of bronze, while her skin was the even brown of roasted grain. Her hair smelled of sandalwood. It was not oiled with it; that was just the way it smelled, coincidence. She gazed at Telemakos steadily, her expression faintly worried. She had been crying, but her eyes were dry. She was so young she could not yet make tears when she wept. Her eyes were the clear gray of a winter sky.
“She has eyes just like Athena’s,” Telemakos said. “In The Odyssey.”
“I’ve thought that too,” Goewin said with a small, tired smile. “‘The gray-eyed goddess,’ Homer calls her.”
“You honey,” Telemakos whispered to the baby. She stared at him with her dry, bright eyes. “Oh, you honey. I wish I could hold you.”
He could not even move to touch her. She seemed the smallest, most vivid creature he had ever seen, more vibrant even than Sheba and Solomon had been as cubs, because he could sense the latent intelligence looking out through her clear, gray eyes.
Telemakos looked up at Goewin. “Her name is Athena,” he declared.
Goewin twisted her mouth into a weary smile and nodded. “You are right.” She leaned down gently and lifted the baby onto her shoulder again. “I don’t think either of your parents will contest that choice. And who knows, maybe it is a smoke screen I can use. The emperor calls his advisor Mentor, after all, not Athena, and if it is ever spoken abroad, it will seem to mean only the baby.” Goewin blew out a sharp breath through pinched nostrils, like an angry sigh. “High time she had a name, as well, poor thing. I’m frustrated with your parents, Telemakos. Your mother lies in bed weeping half the day and no longer bothers to comb her hair; your father turns his back and walks out of the room if the baby is in it. If you die, I will leave this house and take your little Athena with me. But if you live—”
“I’ll have to help you,” Telemakos said. “I will, I promise.”
Goewin went to find his father.
Ferem, the butler, came in quietly and began to set out the too-familiar physician’s instruments on a clean white cloth; all except the small, narrow jeweler’s saw, which he laid in the brazier. He knelt at Telemakos’s side.
“God bless you, child.”
He took Telemakos’s hand, the sound one, and kissed it gently. “Your mother will be here in a moment,” Ferem said, “and she’ll stay till you’re asleep. I will see you in the morning, when you wake up.”
The second half of that week was not very different from the first. Telemakos was scarcely aware enough to realize what had happened to him; he lay half-dead as his body fought off the last of the infection. But the cruel nails were gone. Once he heard his aunt ask soberly, “How is it with our young lion tamer now?” There was quiet relief and firm confidence in his father’s answer: “Much better.”
Then one morning Telemakos woke up clear headed and ravenously hungry. He barely had the strength to shake the rattle that would bring Ferem; he had been kept alive over the last fortnight on little more than honey and water.
His mother came in. She had combed her hair or allowed someone to comb it for her: it was fixed out of her face in the familiar, neat rows of narrow plaits, billowing loose and full around the base of her neck. Telemakos felt as though he had not seen her for months, though her room was next to his.
“You’ve been lost! You’ve been lost!” he cried out to her. “I can’t reach you. Kiss me again and again! Oh, come closer, I need you!”
“You don’t,” she said. “You need Medraut, and you need Goewin. All I do is feed people.”
“I need you to hold me,” Telemakos said plaintively.
But she was right: she had to feed him. Ferem propped him up so he could drink, and Turunesh held a bowl of broth to his lips.
“Ugh, this horrible British stock,” Telemakos said. “Why do you let Goewin cook?”
It was delicious, though; it was as if he had never tasted food before.
“She’s been fishing, south of the city, where the river Mai Barea grows so broad,” his mother said. “She takes the baby with her.”
“I’m not drinking fish paste soup if there’s fresh trout in the kitchens,” Telemakos said firmly. “I want it fried in pepper.”
He did not get the pepper, but his mother gave in and let him have a tiny piece of fish, and mashed banana. She fed him patiently and wiped his mouth and dusted invisible crumbs off the bandages strapped across his chest. She was elaborate in keeping her attention strictly on his right side. Telemakos could tell that whatever was wrong with her had not gone away: she was not whole; she was not completely there.
He said, “This is the most wonderful food I’ve ever eaten. As soon as I can walk again, the first thing I will do is go down to the lake and catch my own dinner.”
His mother collapsed across his legs with her face in her arms and burst into tears.
Telemakos was bewildered. He thought that fishing was something he could do, something that would make him feel normal again. Being able to walk through woodland five miles outside the city to his grandfather’s fishing lodge seemed a reasonable goal to him, still yet a distant goal, but perhaps achievable before winter came again. And if he fixed his mind on that, it would make it easier to bear the terrible truth that he could not use a bow and could no longer hunt with his father.
But maybe I could learn to use a spear, Telemakos thought, while his mother wept hopelessly into his lap
.
“Mother,” Telemakos said softly, and managed to extract himself from beneath her weight so he could touch her hair. “Mother, don’t cry. I’m so tired of not being able to move.” He had spent the first two months of that year with his hands tied behind his back, and the last three in bed. It was too much for one year. He wanted to watch bushbuck grazing in the highland savannah, to play with Athena, to go back to drawing maps and learning the names of stars, to listen to the courtiers gossiping in the New Palace. He wanted to see the emperor’s lions. They were modest pleasures and, Telemakos was sure, they were all within reach.
“I want a holiday,” he said.
“What holiday shall you ever have?” his mother wept. “What will become of you, boy?”
“Mother, please don’t cry. I hate it that I’ve made you so sad.”
“It’s not you,” Turunesh said. “It’s that wretched baby. You would not be lying here if not for her. I have no joy of her, ever. She never lets me sleep, she never stops weeping, she never smiles, she never thanks anyone—”
“She’s a baby!” Telemakos interjected, shocked by this outburst and half inclined to laugh.
“I can’t do anything for her. I can’t do anything for you. Better she had never been born.”
Ferem, who had been standing at the window, now said apologetically, “I must help your mother to her room, Telemakos. I’ll come back.”
Telemakos watched them go, his mother’s bent shoulders shaking as the old man guided her out. He glanced down at his bare left side, at his shoulder and chest wrapped tightly in white bandages, and thought perhaps he should feel more unhappy. But he felt nothing but relief. His shoulder hurt, but it was clean, local pain. It did not spread up and down his body when he moved, and he did not have the dreadful, sick feeling that it would never go away until he let the faceless man with a scorpion’s claws pound a nail through his heart.
I can go fishing, Telemakos thought contentedly, and I will.
The green sunbird continued to sip at the sweet water on the windowsill. Telemakos worked at being able to stand up. In another week he could walk from his bed to the window without having to stop and cling to the sill, gasping from exertion, before he started back. But it got easier.
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