The Lion Hunter

Page 4

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.
He quickly grew bored with this circuit and began to make his way slowly through the house. His father was still so paranoid about the infection recurring that he posted guards at the outside doors to stop Telemakos from venturing into the garden; he could not be trusted to keep out of the fishpond or the stables.
One afternoon when Goewin was away, Athena cried to herself for so long that Telemakos thought there must be no one else alive in the entire city.
Oh, this awful house, he thought.
Eventually he could no longer stand to listen to it. He got up and put his head through to his mother’s bedroom: she was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with her head wrapped up in a shawl as though she were trying to suffocate herself. Telemakos assumed she was merely trying to stop her ears.
Why don’t they get a nurse? Telemakos wondered. Grandfather makes all these empty threats about sending the baby away when he wants to scare my mother, but if no one wants to take care of Athena, why don’t we just hire a nurse for her? We could afford a nurse, even if the plague quarantine has made Grandfather so parsimonious he won’t buy new lamps when we break them. We could afford a dozen nurses. I had a nurse. I had a nurse for so long I was old enough to cut my name into a piece of cedar wood for her to remember me by when she left. I did it in Greek; it was when I started learning to read The Odyssey. I must have been at least seven years old.
It occurred to Telemakos that his parents had not paid much more attention to him as an infant than they did to his sister. His father had not even known of his existence for the first six years of Telemakos’s life; his mother had continued her noblewoman’s audiences and parties and the work she did for her father, with little change in her routine after Telemakos was born. It had been made clear to him on several occasions—though not by his mother, to be fair—that he was lucky not to have been sequestered on a clifftop or in a hermitage, as often happened to unwanted royal children.
But my mother wanted me, Telemakos thought. I reminded her of my father. That’s why she kept me. And Athena only reminds them of my accident.
He followed the sound of the baby’s frustrated, abandoned screams. The nursery was next to his mother’s room, and Athena lay shrieking and sobbing in a large palm basket raised to the level of the window. Evidence of Goewin’s presence was all about the room. She had hung copper chimes in this window, also; they clinked and tinkled in the summer wind from the Simien Mountains. Big, brightly colored beads were strung across the cradle.
Telemakos leaned over so that his face was close to the baby’s and said softly, “Hello, little sister.”