The Lion Hunter

Page 6

He left his father in his bedroom while he went into the nursery.
Athena was just awake. She woke quietly of late, because now that her hands worked for her she was able to grasp at the beads and toys hanging over her face, and they kept her entertained until someone more interesting came along. Telemakos loved the look of her eyes when they met his after she had been asleep. They glinted like sunlight on water, as if everything in the world held unlimited excitement and expectation.
He could lift her easily now. She was heavier, but not much, and he was considerably stronger. He hoisted her over his shoulder and took her back to their father.
Medraut stood up, but Telemakos barred his way. Medraut glared at him through narrowed storm-blue eyes.
“Stop blaming her for my accident,” Telemakos said. “It was my own fault.”
“I cannot love her,” Medraut answered. His deep, melodious voice was cold and flat.
“Only look at her,” Telemakos insisted, and edged aside so Medraut could see the baby’s face.
She was nearly seven months old now. She was not a big baby, but she held her head up with such alert and intense interest, and had such a thick shock of springing, burning hair, that she seemed much older than she was.
Medraut held out the stiff, arthritic little finger of his left hand. Athena grasped it firmly with her own unthinkably small fingers, blindly trusting and certain.
“All who are born have a right to be,” Medraut murmured to himself, but then he shook away the baby’s hand sharply and repeated, in a low voice, “God help me, but I cannot love her.”
“Just…Do you have to love her? Just live with her, call her by her name. Here’s what you can do,” Telemakos said. “Tell Amosi to stop sending me opium. I don’t use it, and it’s pure evil to use that stuff on Athena.”
For half a second, Telemakos thought his father was going to strike him.
But Medraut spoke with icy control. “Not I, boy. No one has ever been that desperate to keep her quiet.”
“Not on purpose,” Telemakos said. “But Mother still suckles her, sometimes.”
“For God’s sake.” Medraut relaxed, and sighed. “So she does. All right—it’s time we put a stop to that addiction, anyway. This wretched house.”
Everybody cursed Grandfather’s house when there were no other convenient scapegoats left. Telemakos liked the house and felt sorry for it. Like Athena, it had not done anything.
He went fishing with his grandfather. Telemakos and Kidane had quite a formal relationship, partly because Kidane sat on the emperor’s private council and was usually even busier than Goewin, and partly because Kidane had always been the ultimate authority over Telemakos’s behavior. When Telemakos was younger, his grandfather had never hesitated to have him whipped for his more serious transgressions. It was Kidane who had seen to it that Telemakos knew how to deport himself appropriately in a roomful of courtiers. But Telemakos liked his grandfather, who was noble and broadminded, and who had taught him how to listen. So they went fishing together, taking bedrolls and a small sack of tef flour so that they could camp for a few days even if they failed to catch anything.
It made Telemakos feel reborn to be outside the city. The highland fields were yellow with ripe grain, and the snowcapped Simien Mountains beckoned from the far horizon. The sounds and smells of the woodland river valley were intoxicating: chattering monkeys, screaming hornbills, the hooting hyena’s yelp. Grandfather relaxed out of his role of councilor and disciplinarian and spent long, wet hours instructing Telemakos in the art of poling the reed-built canoe.
“Don’t try to lift the pole the whole way out,” Kidane suggested. “You can do that with two hands, but it’s too long to do it with one. Try tipping it end over end, like the spoke of a wheel.”
Telemakos was slow, and he was not strong enough to keep it up for long, but he could do it.
“Will you teach me how to throw a spear?” Telemakos asked Kidane.
“I don’t know how to throw a spear,” his grandfather answered. “I’m no huntsman. Ask your father.”
They ate trout Telemakos gutted himself, using a flat rock as a butcher block, holding each fish down with his left knee and his right toes as he carefully cut loose the shining head and slit the silver belly to pull out its backbone. It was not the neatest work he had ever done, but it was without a doubt the most satisfying. He and Kidane slept contentedly through three black, still nights in the frail fishing lodge with walls of woven reed.
They were woken in the blue light before dawn on the fourth morning of their holiday by a lion roaring, the sound carrying with all the huge reverberation of rolling thunder. It was at least a mile away, but it sounded as though it were just the other side of the thin wall.
“Child, you’re quaking,” Grandfather said softly. They had both started bolt upright. Somewhere, not far off, a family of frightened baboons shrieked and scolded. Kidane pulled Telemakos’s blanket up around his shoulders.
Telemakos sat rigid, eyes wide and nostrils flared.
“He’s not so near as he sounds,” Kidane said soothingly.
“I know. I’m not afraid of lions,” Telemakos whispered. “But the smell…”
He shivered again, and knew that his father was right about the wounds to his spirit.
“What smell?” Kidane said.
“Can you not smell the baboons?” Telemakos whispered. “Anako smelled like that. There is nothing to be afraid of. But still it makes me want to be sick.”
“You’re hungry,” Grandfather said practically. “Let’s make breakfast.”
Grandfather pulled on his shamma, climbed down the short catwalk that led outside from the sleeping platform, and began to rake at the ashes of last night’s fire. “Bring the pan and flour,” he called to Telemakos.
Telemakos wound his own shamma over his shoulders, feeling caught in tendrils of nightmare. He could still smell baboon. His ruined shoulder twitched as he clenched and unclenched the muscles in his back, trying to free the arm that was not there from bonds that were not there. Telemakos clamped his teeth together to keep them still and lifted the lid from the flour basket.
The half-empty sack inside lay folded neatly upon itself. Telemakos nearly reached in to pick it up, but the shadow in the fold was moving, a tiny clot of darkness shifting and reforming like a spot before his eyes. He pulled back with a low cry of surprise and loathing. It was a scorpion.
“Telemakos?”
He heard his grandfather call his name in concern, but it did not occur to him to answer. Telemakos watched the little, dangerous creature blundering about among the dark folds of cloth. He wondered, What does it feel like, a scorpion’s sting? It’s so small. It can’t hurt as much as a lion’s teeth, can it, something so lightweight?
Hara’s scorpion’s pincers had held him lightly too, before wedging the knife’s point beneath his fingernails.
Telemakos came at it from behind, prodding the back of its curved tail with one of his scarred fingertips. The barbed whip lashed out at nothing, and Telemakos backed away.
Grandfather was at his side again, slapping his fingers sharply.
“You surely know better than that, boy!”
Telemakos bent, staring at the flour sack, watching the shadows.
“Mother of God,” Grandfather swore under his breath. He slammed the lid down on the basket, then took Telemakos by the back of his neck and drove him out of the hut. He marched his grandson straight down the bank and over his knees into Mai Barea, and threw a potful of river water into Telemakos’s face.
“Ai, Grandfather, stop!”
Kidane lowered the pot.
“Are you awake yet?” he asked gruffly. “Come and help me make breakfast, then. I’ll take care of the flour.” He did not mention the awful thing inhabiting the flour sack, but he asked, “Were you stung?”
“I’m all right,” Telemakos said.
Grandfather let out a sigh of relief. “We’ll go home today, I think,” he said quietly.
Goewin laughed as Kidane and Telemakos began to unpack their baskets of trout in the courtyard.
“What were you trying to do, feed the five thousand?”
“I said I could fish.”
“So you did. Come with me to take some to Gedar.”
In the two and a half years since the plague quarantine had been in place, forbidding all foreign trade, half the merchants’ mansions in Grandfather’s neighborhood had fallen derelict. In the villa across the street, Gedar’s family still lived in two salvaged rooms without any cooks or gardeners or animals bigger than chickens. Goewin took it upon herself to bring them a barrel of flour every month, and coffee, and a parcel of honeycomb from the monastery at Abba Pantelewon.
“I’ve just got home,” Telemakos said. “I want to see Athena.”
“Bring her with you,” answered Goewin. “She likes going out.”
“I can’t carry her that far.”
“What rubbish. You carried fifteen pounds of trout the whole way back from the lake, didn’t you? Athena isn’t any heavier. Let me show you how to wrap the carrying cloth. It’s much easier to carry her on your hip than over your shoulder.”
V
LOAVES AND FISHES
IT WAS A SMALL battle to get the squirming, anxious baby to cooperate. Athena was interested in the fish. She kept trying to dive and grab at the basket while Goewin tried to tie her up. Goewin could not quite work out how to make the carrying cloth fit Telemakos, and he, awkwardly, could not hold Athena in place against his hip or tie the knots himself. But at last they got the baby fixed tightly against his left side, leaving free his right. Athena wound both hands into his hair.
“Help me, Goewin. Ai! Pull your own hair, you monster!” The baby’s hands were too close to his head for him to be able to see them. “I shall teach you to comb it for me, if you like it so much.”
Goewin, watching, suddenly laughed in delight.
“Now you know what it’s like,” she said. “That is just how I’ve spent the past seven months, little better off than you. Baby under one arm, trying to draw maps and make your soup and fold clean napkins with the other. You owe me, boy.” She tickled Athena beneath her chin and kissed her behind one ear. “You both owe me, owlet.”
They crossed the street together, Goewin carrying the fish and Telemakos carrying the baby. Goewin put down her basket to strike the bell at Gedar’s gate; the neighbor children opened to them. Their shabby clothes were clean, and bitter pride smoldered in the eyes of the two elder boys as they went down on their knees before Goewin. The youngest did not bow.
“Get up, Sabarat,” said Goewin. “And you, Japheth. I’ve told you before, you need not kneel to me. Is your mother in?”
“Mother and Father are both in,” said Sabarat, the eldest, with blank politeness. As far as Telemakos knew, Mrs. Gedar never went out, but Gedar was always trying to drum up business in the city’s markets; Sabarat, who was nearly a grown man now, usually went with him.