The Lion Hunter

Page 3

Goewin slapped the book down on the floor. She stood and walked to the window, where she put up both hands to rattle them among the colored glass beads and strips of beaten copper that she had hung there to catch the light. “Let’s talk of something else, Telemakos.”
“Tell me about my sister,” he demanded immediately.
Goewin smiled. She stood with her back to the window, one hand still playing lightly among the wind chimes. “I will bring her to see you someday soon,” Goewin said. “If your father allows you company. She’s fussier than you, though. She cries and cries and cries. The only time she ever stops is when she’s suckling, or sleeping on top of someone.”
“Does she sleep on top of you?”
“I took her to bed with me for two nights, just after she was born,” Goewin said. “Otherwise your mother would never have got any sleep at all. Then I came here, of course.”
“If Ras Meder would let me go home, the baby could sleep on me,” Telemakos suggested.
Goewin gave him a withering look. “Do you think your father will allow a wriggling slug of a baby kicking at your bare ribs anytime soon, boy? Maybe after your skin grows back.”
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 his 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.”