The Lion Hunter

Page 19

“We are Socotran,” he said rebelliously. “Dawit Alta’ir the Star Master is our uncle. Our great-grandmother was his elder sister.”
“You are related to everybody!” said the big girl, Inas. “That makes you some-cousin kin to the najashi. The Star Master is Queen Muna’s father.” She paused only for a moment, as though to take a breath, and then produced a calculation so rapid it was astonishing: “You would be second cousins once removed to the najashi’s children, if they had lived. Small wonder he is anxious to welcome you. He has no nearer lineage. He will treat you as his own son and daughter.”
“As he does all the Scions!” said Malika, the queen of Sheba. “Do you hear that, little baby girl? You are our sister. Shall you play with us while Telemakos goes to see the Globe Room? Take him aloft, Shadi. The Star Master likes you.”
“All right, come on,” the dark boy said agreeably, and stood up.
Telemakos hesitated. Athena stood in his lap now, with her arms around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder in a way that declared ownership.
“Come, baby,” Inas said. “Stay here with the birds while your brother goes to see his new bed. Look, we can paint you, too.” She daubed a swirl of blue across the back of Athena’s hand.
Athena screamed. She stared at her hand and shrieked again, and shook her arm furiously as though she could shake the paint off, screeching like fury.
“Sorry—sorry—” Inas was not stupid. She swiped quickly at the indigo streak with a thick towel. “It doesn’t hurt, don’t cry—”
Telemakos was smothered by Athena’s clinging grip. Her carrying on was so disabling that he actually let the other children peel her away from him.
“You do it, baby,” Inas said. “You do it to me.”
“Look, Tena.” Telemakos tried, dipping up fingersful of blue dye. He looked at Inas with one eyebrow raised. “All right, my lady?”
She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Go on, then.”
“See, Tena, do it like this.” He slashed Inas’s face with paint.
“Thanks for that, you pestilent spawn of a desert jackal,” she said amiably. “All right, baby, your turn.”
Athena stuck one finger tentatively into the makeup pot.
Telemakos slipped away with the boy Shadi. He heard Athena’s screams erupt behind him the second he set foot in the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder, and Shadi started up the stairwell. “Are you coming?”
The sound of Athena’s voice never stopped. It faded, but it did not stop. They reached the final story of the Ghumdan palaces and came into Abreha’s document room, and the baby’s wails continued to reach them, muffled, from the windows on the level below.
The reading room was roofed with a vaulted skylight of alabaster panes so thin you could see the shadows of doves perching on the other side. The translucent stone cast warm yellow light over a circle of low easels, where a gray-haired, senatorial person sat poring over an inventory.
Shadi bowed and excused himself in a whisper to the custodian at the scriptorium’s portal, then tiptoed past the scholar. Telemakos followed. His guide pushed open the door to an antechamber, climbed down three steep steps, and beckoned to Telemakos.
“This is the Great Globe Room,” Shadi said. “That’s the Great Globe. You see.”
Telemakos went through the door, down one step, and was so lost in wonder that he could not speak.
The room was filled with stars. The smallest was no bigger than Athena’s thumbnail, the largest the size of her fist, and each was crafted of a single quartz crystal set in silver wire. They hung by black cotton thread against a domed ceiling painted black, and seemed to float suspended as effortlessly as real stars. Telemakos was swimming in them until he came down the steps, and then the lowest of them missed the top of his head by an inch. Unthinkingly he reached up, to be among them, and brushed stars aside as he walked into the middle of the room.
Pendent above the highest stars was a globe big enough that Telemakos could have curled inside it. It was figured of leaded glass, and this was painted over in a blue so deep it was nearly black. Its surface was peppered with hundreds of tiny flaws where points had been scratched in the paint.
“A star globe,” Telemakos breathed. “Have you seen it alight?”
“The Star Master never lights it anymore. He’s going blind. That’s why the Lady Muna chooses his equipment for him in the suqs. I expect you’ll do it now. Do you know how to read the globe?”
“It would show the positions of the stars against the sky,” Telemakos explained, but even as he spoke he realized it was more complex an instrument than that. Lit from within, the globe would cast pinpoint images of the stars against the black dome of the ceiling. And then you could spin the globe to make the stars trace their paths around the heavens.
As Telemakos stood with his eyes fixed above him, the room was suddenly filled with Athena’s angry, gasping shouts. He turned around sharply, expecting to see someone standing in the door with her. But there was no one, and Telemakos leaped up the steps and into the upper reading room.
It was quiet there. The man with the inventory did not look up. The noise was coming from the Great Globe Room.
“Come see,” Shadi said, kneeling in a corner by the far wall. “This is how Muna and her father talk to each other, so they don’t have to go up and down all the stairs.”
He was pointing to a hole in the floor. The globe was mounted on a pulley, and this hung down through a shaft leading to the room below. That was where the screams were coming from. “Muna is home,” Shadi reported. “She’s taken your sister into the nursery. Can you see?”
Telemakos joined him on the floor and looked through the hole. They could see pink light filtering in through the rosecolored windows below, and they could hear the baby in the throes of her tantrum, but they could not see anyone.
“I must go down,” Telemakos said.
“Muna will manage her, I promise you, and her sister-slave Rasha endures no nonsense from any child. If Muna’s back from market, the Star Master will be up here soon, and he will want to meet you.”
Telemakos lay flat on his stomach, with his head hanging halfway between the palace floors. If I call out, he thought, it will upset Athena even more because she won’t be able to reach me.
Then she stopped shrieking. The sobs continued, sporadically, as if the baby were still feeling sorry for herself, but something had distracted her enough to calm her down. When her gasping became less frequent, Telemakos could hear a woman’s deep, beautiful voice humming a mesmerizing rhythm on four notes, over and over.
“Away. Go away,” Athena said viciously.
Shadi tapped him on the shoulder. Telemakos sat up and looked behind him.
“Don’t tell me who you are,” said the man who stood on the lowest step. “I know your name.”
XII
STAR MASTER AND MORNINGSTAR
HE WAS BAREFOOT. HIS beard was flyaway and mostly white; around his mouth it was stained an improbable pink. There were leaves—small, glossy leaves—caught in it here and there. His white hair was bound back from his face in a great unruly mare’s tail, and Telemakos, who was finding his own hair increasingly difficult to govern, had a sudden mad vision of himself in fifty years.
Shadi held obediently silent. The old man put up his right hand and touched the star that hung nearest it.
“Antares,” he said. “The Scorpion’s heart.”
Telemakos flinched. He said, with childish desperation, “That’s not my name.”
“Of course not. It’s the star’s name.”
The swinging stars were oriented as though when you entered the room you stood facing northward, at the year’s first solstice. That was the Scorpion, hung about the door. Telemakos looked up; he sat beneath the Phoenix.
The old man came down the last step and reached with his left hand for another star. “Sabik.” He let go of Antares, and moved forward his right hand, and his right foot. “Ras Alhague. Head of the man who holds the Serpent.”
He was blind, or close to it; his eyes were so milky with cataracts that you could not tell what color they had been. He guided himself across the room by feeling his way from star to star. He stepped toward Telemakos, left hand and left foot.
Telemakos, on both knees, swiftly bent his forehead to the floor in formal reverence.
“Stand up, or I can’t see you. I despise ceremony. Gebre Meskal sends me a student, does he? Are you any good? What star is in my hand?”
It took Telemakos a moment to place it correctly, but then he realized its significance. “The flying eagle,” Telemakos answered. “Alta’ir.”
“Good. You know my name, Dawit Alta’ir, and we need no introduction. By Epiphany you must be able to name all the stars in this room. Can you guess why I have hung the ceiling with stone stars?”
“So you can touch them?”
“It is actually so that I can see them. When the sun shines in the eastern windows, it sets the crystals alight. I have not seen a real star since the great comet of ten years ago. But do not imagine you may hide from me, son of Medraut son of Artos; I shall have no trouble keeping track of you. Detail and color I give up on, but your silver head is like a great glowing moon among my stars, a bright planet coming and going. Athtar the Morningstar, the forgotten god of South Arabia! Telemakos the Morningstar, prince of the rising generation! Let’s start. You may go, Shadi. Shadi, do you know how I know you?”
“I do not, Magus,” the thin boy muttered.
“No other king obeys me when I tell him not to speak.”
“Thank you, Magus.” Shadi excused himself and scuttled away through the door to the scriptorium.
Telemakos watched him go. He wondered how many other of Abreha’s orphaned wards had already inherited titles to kingdoms kept in care for them hundreds of miles away.
Dawit Alta’ir sat down on the floor cross-legged next to Telemakos. The leaves in his beard were kat, a mild stimulant of the highlands. They smelled bitter and fresh. Dawit’s breath smelled of kat as well, and faintly of rosewater. At his side, against the wall where it would catch light from the eastern windows, there was a low, wide cabinet. Mounted in its broad teak surface was a half-sphere of crystal filled with clear liquid. Dawit Alta’ir slid open a door in the cabinet and took out a tablet and stylus.
“All right, Morningstar, you must show me what you can do. Draw me your kingdom.”
“I haven’t got a kingdom.”
Dawit cuffed him lightly on the back of the head with the tablet. “You are the only child in this palace who hasn’t, then,” he said. “Aksum, you moonling. The kingdom you call home, your emperor’s kingdom. Draw me Aksum.”
Biting his lip at his own idiocy, Telemakos fixed the tablet firmly between his knees and pulled his mind into focus. He began to draw. He did not allow himself to grow absorbed, but he felt a faint glow of satisfaction as he guided the point of the stylus with surety across the beeswax plate.