The Lion Hunter

Page 16

Athena was trying to untangle her face.
“Do not look, Tena,” Telemakos rasped. He stood directly beneath the bare, blood-streaked feet, so close that were he taller he could have reached up and brushed away the flies that clustered busily over the blackening wounds.
Athena twisted herself free.
“You hide again,” Telemakos whispered.
Athena fought with her brother, refusing to make a game of it. “Feet,” she said. “Poor feet.”
Telemakos took a deep breath, struggling for control of his stomach. He remembered to keep hold of the lion. Walk away! One step, another, in a dozen paces it will be gone.
He mastered himself. He could not walk away, passionlessly, pretending he had seen nothing. He stood still, looked up, and said clearly to the dying man, “Peace to you. God rest you.”
The children around him broke into a babel of astonishment and censure.
“The najashi ought to whip you!”
“Bless him? Are you mad? He is a condemned traitor!”
“You don’t talk to a dead man!”
Telemakos turned on the pack that had driven him here, and said in quick, accusatory fury, “Does it matter whether or not anyone talks to him? However evil he may be, he is suffering for it now, and I wish him rest.”
They were silent around him for a moment, eyes wide with disbelief or narrowed in disapproving frowns, appalled by such daring.
Then Iskinder, who perhaps needed to prove his own daring again after his refusal to hold the lion, shouted a word up to the miserable creature lingering above them.
“Scorpion!”
Dread lit in Telemakos like wildfire.
Once, hunting in the Aksumite highlands, Telemakos and his father had been caught on an open hillside during a dry storm so intense that the charged sky had pulled Medraut’s fine hair out around his head in a silver halo and made the down on Telemakos’s arms and legs prick as though he were being stung by sand driven in a gale. The foreboding that wrapped Telemakos now was as compelling as the force of that silent lightning.
“Ho, Scorpion!”
Astonishingly, horribly, the transfixed man opened his eyes.
“Here is one of your fellow countrymen who wants to bless you, you treacherous, double-dealing cur,” Iskinder called up.
The man’s hot eyes turned on Telemakos, and they looked at each other for too long a moment.
Then, as if by some terrible enchantment, the condemned one came vividly alive and found the strength to pour forth in a croaking hiss: “The mute has found his tongue at last! You are a long way from the salt mines in Afar, silent little sneak, and you did not wear such fine clothes then, when you sold your freedom for a mouthful of water. All those weeks before they came for you I thought you must be one of Gebre Meskal’s jackals, I swore to it, I knew in my bones you were blinding me to something—Who sent you?”
It was Hara. It was Hara, the corrupt foreman from the salt mines, faceless Hara of the scorpion’s pincers—Telemakos glanced unwisely at the impaled hands, to assure himself they were really hands, and saw there a living horror worse than any of his dreams.
“Who sent you? What bitter god sends you to me now, to taunt me that I did not cut out your tongue when I was advised to? Why should I want or need your jackal’s blessing on my dying breath?” Hara spat venomously, scarcely human anymore, a living cadaver. “A curse on such a blessing. Let the najashi hang you up in my place next, you unholy creeping mongrel spy! A curse on your blessing! A curse on the lot of you—”
This went beyond anyone’s endurance. The children scattered, muttering charms and prayers, touching the leaves of basil and crossing themselves and covering their eyes. Telemakos had a fleeting impression of their hands fluttering like a flock of doves taking suddenly to wing.
“An evil dream,” Hara sighed. “Yes, it is only a dream,” he told himself, and closed his eyes.
Telemakos, too, closed his eyes, as the white square whirled red and black around him. He fought off the nausea but lost his footing and crashed heavily onto one knee.
“Come away,” said a low voice in his ear.
Iskinder had not deserted him. Iskinder had firm hold of Menelik’s lead, and pulled Telemakos to his feet. Athena was shrieking. Telemakos’s fall had frightened her into tears, and he had not even noticed.
“For God’s sake, come away. I am very sorry I said anything—”
“I too!” Telemakos gasped.
“Come on—”
Athena continued to scream. The lion growled low in its throat. Iskinder led them beyond Hara’s hearing and his fading sight; they crossed the square to sit on the far edge of one of the fountains. Gulls scattered and settled again on the black thrones as they passed.
“Here, take your lion back, I’ll draw you a drink.”
Telemakos twined the leash around his ankle and bent to his howling sister. “It’s all right, little owlet, hush now.” He reached into the spray and dripped water over Athena’s sweaty hands. Menelik nosed between them, licking at the baby’s fingers. “Stop that, your tongue’s too rough.” Telemakos pushed the fond, heavy head away. The big boy came back with a dipper of water.
“Thank you.” Telemakos tried to drink, but he could not hold the dipper steady. Iskinder took it back and waited patiently for the shuddering to quiet.
“That wretch thought he knew you,” Iskinder said.
“I have never seen him before in my life,” Telemakos vowed, and it was true. Hara had kept him blindfolded for longer than two months. Telemakos would never have known him if Hara had not recognized him first.
“They say crazy things, sometimes, while they’re hanging there. Come now, baby, stop your hullabaloo. Can you drink from a cup? Show your brother how to do it.” Iskinder held the dipper to Athena’s lips. It was nearly as big as her head. She took hold of it with both hands and drank as though she were dying of thirst.
The sharp, cool part of Telemakos’s mind that could stand at a distance from the rest of him observed, This boy is behaving nobly.
“Your friends will all wave their sprigs of basil at you now, and run away from you, for being mad enough to stick with my fell company,” Telemakos said.
“Oh, well,” the boy answered without rancor, still holding the dipper up for Athena. “He cursed the guard, too, when they brought him here yesterday. It is three months since he was condemned; I think he must have spent all that time thinking up the ugliest way to damn his executioners. If I’m to join their ranks, I may as well get used to it.”
Telemakos frowned, staring over his shoulder through the fountain and squinting, trying to pull some sense out of the shock.
“Who is he? What had he done?”
“He’d been smuggling. He was a pirate,” Iskinder said. Athena pushed the dipper away and turned back to Telemakos to wipe her face on his shamma. “They announced it at the execution. He ran the customs office here for the past two years, cheating the city. But he was arrested because he’d financed a plot against the king. So he was probably a spy as well, or some other agent of a rival nation. Perhaps Aksum, his own nation. They wouldn’t announce that. They wouldn’t risk offending the Aksumite emperor. But all the talk is that he was a spy. It’s often a spy’s death.”
Telemakos again scooped water from the fountain and dashed it over his head. Athena clung to him like a barnacle, scrubbing her hot face against his shoulder.
Now I know, he thought. Now I know what happened to Hara.
“I would never make a city guard,” Telemakos said in a low voice. “I would never have the stomach for it. I think I would rather take such punishment myself than have to deal it out.”
He splashed more water down his neck. It was tepid, sweltering as the air.
“Your courage must stretch a long way further than mine, then,” said the young man named for Alexander. “I could not even speak such a thought aloud, bare minutes after being cursed to such a fate.”
It was close to sundown when Telemakos climbed the broad public stairway to the archon’s mansion. He felt crushed by the length and breadth of that day: the stifling heat; the strange city; the edgy, urban children; the hours spent carrying Athena while keeping the lion on leash. And so back to Hara. What did it feel like, what did you think, when they were driving the nails in? It had not been a dream. It was real.
There was a party of Hadrami legates standing on the archon’s terrace discussing the impending annual Great Assembly of the Himyar Federation. They were hard, turbaned men representing the warrior tribes of the wadi valley that bordered the northeastern Arabian desert; they wore robes of sweeping iridescent indigo and great, curved daggers, and they were greeting and saluting the al-Muza officials while their salukis waited free but obedient at their heels.
Telemakos pushed Menelik gently to the ground and knelt there with the lion to admire the dogs and wait for them to leave. The sun was smoldering lower over the Red Sea through the sullen haze at his back.
“Look at the dogs, my owlet,” Telemakos whispered in his sister’s ear. She had not napped that day, and he knew her mood was as brittle as his.
“Boy’s hair?” she requested, twisting and pulling at it.
“Shhh.”
The dogs were breathtaking. They were lean and sleek, with long, silken fur; Menelik, who was no taller than they, seemed heavy and awkward by comparison. The gazelle hounds twitched their long noses in the lion’s direction, gazing with interest at this strange creature: foe or prey or ally? Bound by courtly obedience but tense with curiosity, they moved only their noses. They reminded Telemakos of himself.
At Telemakos’s other side, Menelik made silly chirping noises. Grandfather’s hounds had tolerated him indulgently, and he was used to dogs. Telemakos began to ache with the strain of holding him in check.
“Hush—lie quiet—when they’ve gone, we’ll find the najashi—”
Menelik barked.
In seconds Telemakos became the center of everyone’s attention, surrounded by a swirl of blue robes and gilded dagger hilts and the long, curious, soulful faces of the salukis. “Good dogs,” Telemakos said under his breath, to reassure Athena rather than calm the dogs. But she was anything but frightened. She started panting in imitation of them and grabbed for their silken ears and long noses. Telemakos tried to hold her hands back, and suddenly, without warning, Menelik’s lead slipped through his fingers.
The lion moved free of Telemakos, slow and proud and without fear, until it stood calm and at ease in a circle of salukis. Menelik let them sniff him all over and butted noses with them. The men broke into a chorus of astonishment, and some delight, in formal South Arabian.
“What folly’s this?”
“Well trained, your Dancer.”
“No fear.”
“Back, Windcutter, back, Redbelly, my fine girl—”
“Watch that thing’s teeth!”
What a fuss, Telemakos thought.
“They’re only milk teeth,” he said stiffly, loud enough to be heard well over men and dogs. “The lion’s not six months old. He can’t tear meat yet.”