The Sunbird

Page 11

The night of the smugglers’ meeting was unexpectedly wretched. The suffocating air went suddenly cool and breezy for an hour after sunset, while lightning licked the far edge of the sky; then the monsoon began to whip the palms half over on their sides, and the rain beat down so hard it stung. Telemakos went out wearing only shirt, kilt, and sandals. He never expected to be cold in Adulis, and a shamma would get tangled in the thorns or mire him as he crawled through the culvert. Nor did he feel confident climbing and hiding when he was wearing boots. He was wet as a drowned cat, and freezing, five minutes after he left the governor’s mansion.
When Telemakos had first found the spillway he used as a passage into the mint, it was clogged with dried grass and sand, and he had wondered why anyone had bothered to build such a substantial drainage system in torrid Adulis. Now he knew. Rainwater poured in rivers through the gutter. He hated getting in anyway; he had already made several trials, and though it got easier, he never felt any better about it. The culvert was not long, but it was unforgivingly narrow. Some part of Telemakos’s body—either his head or his feet—always stuck out one end or the other, making him vulnerable. He could not crawl through the channel without a feeling of deep dread that someone was going to catch hold of his feet and pull him back.
Once through in either direction it was all right. There were wonderful places to hide within the walls of the mint: vats and work baskets, open fretwork beneath trays and benches, stone cupboards and niches, spaces that seemed too small for anything bigger than a mongoose. Telemakos’s chief fear tonight was that he would leave trails of water wherever he went.
The dogs gave him no trouble. With Medraut’s help he was able to drug them, all but two. One of these was usually chained, and made a great deal of noise at intruders, and the other always lost interest in Telemakos after a few minutes. These two were his decoys. With the rest of them quiet, Telemakos was free to make his way through the building at will.
He was there first. The smugglers used a different room for each meeting, he knew, so he could only wait for them before he chose a spot to settle in. He prowled through the likely workshops, scouting for good hiding places. He ended in a corner where he found a banked fire. It was under a roofed porch, open to the air at the side; but it was in the lee of the wind, and Telemakos could not resist the glowing furnace.
Neither could the six men who were meeting there. They came straggling in wringing out their shammas and cursing the weather. Telemakos lay full length beneath a granite trough meant for channeling molten metal, and silently cursed with them. The fire was too far across the enclosure to make much difference to him.
He watched and listened. The men drank steaming cups of honey wine and complained loudly that the mint was losing money because of the emperor’s order to debase his own gold coins. One of them seemed to be lamenting gold coinage as a lost craft; Telemakos thought this man a pompous oaf, trying to impress the others. Telemakos was beginning to shiver. He wished they would get to the point.
So did their leader, a foreman from the mint. “Stop moaning,” he told them. “The new year will bring far Sasu’s best gold ore, and then it won’t matter to you what Gebre Meskal puts in his coins.”
“If the Lazarus can put through the warrant for the shipping of the gold.”
“He will. He brings the warrant himself from the Authority.”
“He won’t. He doesn’t like to touch it. He’ll ask the Authority to send it by imperial courier. Word is the Lazarus will go straight to the Afar salt mines next season, and bypass Adulis. He’s scared of Adulis. The emperor has watchmen here; there are too many people who might know him.”
The Authority? The Lazarus?
“The Lazarus isn’t scared of the emperor’s sleuthhounds,” the pompous craftsman sneered, and spat. “He’s scared of plague. He doesn’t trust his own racket to keep it out. He barely missed being caught in Deire, and now he stays away from the coast.”
Telemakos could not stop shivering. He tried to curl himself into a ball, but there was not enough room.
“What’s that?’ asked the craftsman.
The foreman answered, “Rats. They’re everywhere, this close to the water. The dogs have grown fat and lazy feasting on them. So now, tell me again what you said, because I have not heard your news. Do you mean we shall not see the Lazarus at all next season?”
“I said, he’s going to the Afar mines himself, to oversee the cutting. But he won’t pick up his payment here. We’re to send it to Aksum.”
Who in blazes is ‘the Lazarus’?
“And the Authority’s payment?”
“All of it.”
“Damned rats,” said the man who had not spoken a word since the wine was poured. He scooped up a handful of the scrap tin nuggets that lay about the mouth of the furnace and began to sling them low across the yard, into corners and alcoves. He lashed one straight into Telemakos’s face.
It caught the edge of his eyebrow. For a moment he thought it had hit him in the eye. He whipped his head around and sank his teeth into his forearm. The noise of wind and rain and rats covered any sound he might have made.
“It’s not rats,” said the cynical know-it-all with the news. “Someone’s listening. Adulis is full of spies.”
Lying half-blinded and freezing beneath the stone trough, Telemakos had the presence of mind to realize that they had neither seen nor heard him: they were simply nervous. The silent one stood up and strode to the edge of the covered porch, where the rain blew in. He peered into the dark factory yard.
“I think you’re right,” he said.
I think I’m leaving, Telemakos told his friends the rats, silently. Make a lot of noise.
But he was so cold he could not make himself move. The foreman got to his feet and joined the man who was already standing at the edge of the enclosure.
“Let’s sweep the yard,” he said. “You watch the walls; if there’s anyone here, he’ll try to go over. I’ll get one of the dogs.”
All right. Now.
Telemakos touched the small cut on his temple and assured himself he was not badly hurt. He crawled into the open yard away from where the men were sitting. The rain beat down.
The one who was scanning the walls never looked at the drains; he was looking for a grown man. Telemakos crept behind him, and had just reached the channel that would lead him out, when there was a shout from the foreman.
“Beware, Daken! The dogs have been drugged!”
Telemakos pitched himself headfirst through the teeming culvert. His arms and face plunged into stabbing spikes of desert thorn jammed flush with the outer lip of the drain.
Telemakos pulled back in panic, stripping his hands and wrists to ribbons. The bales of thorn had been moved closer to the building since he came in, probably before the meeting had started: the smugglers had foreseen treachery within, and had laid a trap outside the factory for anyone attempting to escape over the walls. Telemakos crouched at the opening to the drain, hidden only by darkness. The men shouted over his head. He slid out on his stomach, feet first this time, and tried to kick the thorn out of his way.
He emerged in what seemed a forest of it, like Crow in the story escaping from Fox: Please, please, please don’t throw me into the bushes! Telemakos was not a crow. He could not open wings and fly free. He kicked and tore his way through the zareba, so cold now that he could not feel the spines ripping his bare legs.
Then he was out. He could hear the men calling to one another from within, and the noise of the one barking dog. They would use the other, the quiet one, to try to find him. Telemakos ran.
He was clumsy and slow. He was back in the street now, but he could hear the chase behind him. If this turned into a race, he was lost.
Hide, hide: they think they’re looking for a man.
He got himself into the thatch of a roof somehow, and the hunt passed beneath him. It was too wet for the dog to pick up any scent. Telemakos waited, praying that Medraut had not been shadowing him this night, and taking back every ill oath he had sworn against the chance storm that was hiding him.
He was now so skittish he could not make himself walk down the middle of the street. He scuttled from doorway to doorway along the back alleys. If they chased him, if they followed him, there would be no sanctuary anywhere; even if he was able to outrun them, once he disappeared into the governor’s house they would know who he was, or could soon find out. He had to escape unseen.
“What in God’s name have you been doing, boy?” the governor’s gatekeeper asked, agape.
“I had a fight with someone’s dog. I was trying to cut home through the gardens in the merchants’ suburb.”
“You were lucky, Telemakos Meder,” said the gatekeeper. “I know a man there who has trained bowmen guarding his villa. They shoot at you before they talk to you. You want to keep away from the merchants’ mansions.”
“I will,” said Telemakos.
“Don’t go in through the Domed Court. The archon’s wife is giving a party.”
Telemakos limped inside, leaving a trail of mud and thatch. His father was waiting for him in the entrance hall.
Medraut seized Telemakos by the shoulders and shook him, and gave a voiceless sob and embraced him, and held him off and shook him again. Telemakos was beyond coping with his father’s furious, desperate concern. He did the first thing he could think of to escape, and walked into the party.
The ladies stared and clucked. The lords joked and snickered behind their hands. “Is my mother here?” Telemakos asked the archon.
Abbas stared at him in disbelief. “Do you need a beating, boy?”
Telemakos glanced down at himself, wondering darkly, Do I look like I need a beating?
“My mother told me to greet her when I was safely in,” he said levelly.
Helena, the archon’s merry wife, pealed with laughter, and her friends with her.
“Turunesh, you shameful excuse for a niece!” Abbas roared across the hall. “Come and greet your wretched child!”
Telemakos found himself made to sit in a deep nest of cushions, with Turunesh on one side of him and Goewin on the other. Goewin’s silken black hair was coiled up and crowned with a narrow tiara of pale Indian sapphires; Turunesh wore intricate bracelets of coral and ivory. Telemakos knew he must look unbelievably scruffy between them. “He hasn’t been fighting,” Turunesh said, waving concerned and curious faces away from them, her bracelets chiming. “It was a dog. He’s crazy with animals. He naps in the emperor’s lion pit. He’s all right, he doesn’t need a doctor, he needs a bath. Telemakos, my love, what do you need?”
“Coffee,” he said promptly. “Hot.”
Goewin and his mother threw back their heads and laughed.
“Yes, all right, love, coffee! Just this once. Helena, can we have a pot, a burner? It’s late, I know—”
“Let me do it,” said Goewin. “I love making coffee.”
The ladies waited on him, turning his tattered and filthy state into a tremendous joke. It was marvelous.