The Sunbird Page 3

  Telemakos climbed out of his own bed and felt his way through the sleeping house, as sure-footed and confident as if he were blind and always found his way by touch and smell and echo. As he had guessed, his mother was not alone in her bed. Telemakos wriggled in between his parents and pulled the blankets over him.

  “Oh, not you, boy,” said Turunesh sleepily, because she was as jealous of his father’s attention as Telemakos, and had him to herself even less. She made room for Telemakos.

  Telemakos lay still between his mother and father, savoring this moment when they were all three together and content, complete.

  He dreamed that the lions were pretending to eat him. He was not afraid of them; he knew they were only playing. They took turns biting the top of his head. Their teeth closed tightly enough to sting his scalp, but not enough to break the skin. They were persistent, and Telemakos was beginning to be annoyed with the game, but he did not know how to get away from their teeth without hurting himself.

  He woke, then; it was still dark. His parents were asleep. His scalp prickled. Telemakos reached up to touch his head and found his father’s hand tangled in his hair.

  He tried to unthread the taut, strong fingers, but his hair was nearly as thick as his mother’s, and matted easily. It was a trial to Turunesh to keep it free of snarls. She liked it long, because it was so bright and so unusual and so like Medraut’s. Medraut had a firm handful, and his grip was like iron. When Telemakos tried to free himself, Medraut sighed in his sleep and tightened his hold so fiercely that Telemakos could not move his head.

  “Ah, little bright one,” said Medraut in Latin, speaking low and clear. “What are you doing here?”

  Telemakos lay frozen, his head trapped, so startled he was almost alarmed. Except for the shouted warning, Telemakos had never heard his father speak.

  “Ras Meder?” he whispered, but he knew that Medraut was asleep, or he would not be talking. Telemakos spoke aloud. “Sir?”

  Is he talking to me? Telemakos wondered, torn between delight and dread. Little one, he said, he must mean me. It did not strike Telemakos strange that Medraut spoke Latin, for it was still spoken throughout Britain, he knew, and Turunesh encouraged her half-British son to use it himself.

  Medraut sighed again, his fingers still wound tight in Telemakos’s hair. Then he uttered a string of syllables in no language Telemakos had ever heard.

  It was like being brushed across the back of the neck: it made his arms break out in gooseflesh. Telemakos was tempted to wake Medraut, only to have his familiar silent self back, and not this gibberish-spouting night creature. But Telemakos wanted to hear the voice again. When Medraut had shouted his son’s name, it had been a terrible sound of fear and warning. This was his real voice, low and deep and gentle, full of music.

  Telemakos reached up once more to touch his father’s hand. Medraut spoke the same string of nonsense, the same sequence. Telemakos listened with all his being, trying to hold the shape of the sound in his mind. He mouthed the syllables over to himself so that he would remember them, as he had done with the words of the salt traders. Telemakos felt sure that whatever language his father spoke in his sleep, his aunt could interpret.

  He lay awake and tense for a long time after that, his head imprisoned, repeating the impossible sentence and straining to hear anything else. But Medraut did not speak again. Telemakos did fall asleep at last, because when next he tried to move his head it was free, and the bright dawn was sneaking into the room, and he and his mother were alone in her bed.

  Telemakos found Goewin packing her ambassador’s satchel. It was still early morning.

  “Have you got anything exciting in there today?” Telemakos asked. She had once brought home a live cricket in a tiny house of carven ivory.

  “Here are little amole,” Goewin said, and gave him a handful of miniature tablets of salt. “Pretty, aren’t they?”

  “What are they for?”

  “Money. Or soup.”

  Telemakos laughed. “‘A rich man eats salt,’” he said, quoting his grandfather. He gave the tablets back to Goewin. “What does this mean?” he asked, and repeated what he had heard Medraut say.

  Goewin packed the salt back in her bag and put it down. Then she stared at Telemakos. She did not answer, so he said it again.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Ras Meder said it in his sleep.”

  Goewin had been startled when Telemakos repeated Medraut’s strange words, but she did not seem surprised when he told her his source. “Medraut has always talked in his sleep,” she said. “It’s why he usually spends the night in a hermit’s hole halfway up the cliff wall at Abba Pantelewon. He doesn’t like anyone to hear him. He would give away state secrets in his sleep, if he had any.”

  “But what does it mean, what he said?”

  “In my native dialect it means, ‘Little brother, go back to bed.’” With bluff, sharp movements, Goewin stuffed maps and a stylus into her satchel.

  Telemakos was perplexed. He frowned, and said, “What did he mean, little brother? Did he mean me?”

  “Of course not,” Goewin said shortly. “Did you go back to bed?”

  “I didn’t…. But I didn’t understand.”

  “He wasn’t talking to you,” said Goewin, and flicked shut the brass clasps on her bag. “He thought you were someone else. He thought I was someone else once, too, and smacked me in the face. He’s monstrous in his sleep. I don’t know how your mother endures him.”

  “Who is Ras Meder’s little brother?”

  “He was my twin brother. His name was Lleu, the Bright One, the young lion. Lleu son of Artos. He was the prince of Britain; he should have been high king of Britain instead of Constantine, but he died in the battle of Camlan, just before I came here to Aksum. Goodness, Telemakos, you were there during all that fuss about making my cousin Constantine the new high king, you must have heard us speaking of Lleu. I thought you heard everything.”

  He did hear everything. He did know who Lleu was. Only he had never considered that the lost prince of Britain had been anyone’s small brother: a young person not unlike himself, who might suddenly need affection when everyone else was asleep, and be lightly scolded for waking people.

  “Why does Ras Meder still talk to Lleu in his sleep?”

  “He loved Lleu more than anything. Lleu’s death broke Medraut into pieces. I think it’s why he won’t talk to anyone.

  “Coming with me this morning?” Goewin finished abruptly, shouldering her satchel. “Or is your father going to take you hunting?”

  “He is,” Telemakos answered forcefully, although this had not been established, or even hinted at, in his odd paternal encounter in the middle of the night. But it was the chief reason Medraut made his sudden appearances in Kidane’s house, and it was what Telemakos lived for.

  Medraut took Telemakos well out of the city when they hunted together. They might be gone for as long as a fortnight, often staying at Kidane’s country estate at Adwa, so that Telemakos could be left in safe hands when Medraut sometimes went out on his own. On more than one occasion they had departed for Adwa without telling anyone where they were going or how long they would be gone, Telemakos because he did not know, and Medraut because he never told anyone anything; it did not occur to either one of them that Turunesh might want to know when her son was about to disappear for over a week. On this day Telemakos thought to warn her, and Turunesh gave him her blessing after a fashion:

  “Oh, get gone. You are safer in the bush with Ras Meder than you are in the lion pit with Sheba and Solomon.”

  This was literally true, for Telemakos had once come home from the lion pit with a finger ripped through to the bone, while Medraut never brought him back with any hurt more serious than carefully tended briar scratches.

  Their hunting together chiefly consisted of creeping noiselessly through savanna and slough, lying silent in long grass, waiting and watching. Medraut could come close enough to an unwary g
azelle that he could snatch hold of it by its horns and the back of its neck, like a lion, while it rolled its eyes and tried to twist its head free. Medraut shot and threw with fearful accuracy, but Telemakos did not doubt that if Medraut wanted for meat he would need no tool other than his hands.

  Telemakos was Medraut’s equal as a tracker, and would soon be his better. His legs were not as long as his father’s, so he was not as fast; but he was much smaller and even quieter, and he could smell things that Medraut could not.

  No one had taught him this skill. It had come through long, long, silent hours of waiting and watching and listening. Telemakos knew lions so well that he could sometimes scent what they had eaten the day before. He could tell with fair accuracy, without looking, how long an animal had been dead. He could often tell what kind of antelope he was following before he saw it. He knew, at least a mile before they came to it, that today there was some wounded thing traveling ahead of them.

  “Something’s bleeding on the road,” Telemakos said, to alert his father. “I don’t know what. Everything stinks of baboon along here.” Medraut nodded.

  They did not necessarily expect to solve the mystery, since they were behind it. But after a time they came to a roadside well, shaded by giant sycamores, with a band of travelers crowded underneath the trees. Some were drinking at the well. At the edge of the band, a boy was being whipped. His bare back was scored with weals, raised though not bloody; he uttered a plaintive cry with each stroke. Medraut let his breath out sharply through his nostrils, a sound of disgust. Telemakos glanced up at his face. His father’s dark blue eyes were narrowed in disapproval, hard and glittering as basalt.

  “I still smell blood,” Telemakos said, puzzled, though not as disturbed as his father.

  Suddenly Medraut pulled Telemakos close against him with one arm like an iron band across his chest and the other hand clamped over his eyes like a blindfold.

  “Hey!”

  Telemakos struggled, pulling at the hand that was blinding him with both of his own, trying to pry it from his eyes. Medraut shifted his grip on his son and pulled one of Telemakos’s arms behind his back.

  Telemakos was outraged. “Let go! I have seen servants beaten before, I’m not a baby!”

  Medraut gave a sharp, warning twist to Telemakos’s imprisoned arm. Never before had he deliberately hurt his child. Telemakos went limp in his father’s hold, shocked and betrayed. The heavy hand over his eyes held him blind.

  The other child’s pathetic, bleating cries carried on, and Telemakos could still smell blood, and something else out of the ordinary for a band of travelers: the sour reek of cat, which he had not been able to pick out on the road because of the baboons.

  “Let me see,” Telemakos begged. He did not mean that he wanted to watch; he only wanted not to be held blind like this. It was a violation. But Medraut held him close, gently while he did not move, more fiercely when he tried to break free. Medraut held Telemakos for as long as the wailing continued, and for a few more moments after it stopped. Then, keeping a heavy, guiding hand on the boy’s shoulder, still warning, Medraut freed Telemakos’s eyes and approached the knot of men who were grouped around the unfortunate servant child.

  They were giving him a drink now, and pulling his shirt back over his head, a thing he could not do himself. Telemakos saw now that both the boy’s hands had been cut off above the wrists. It could not have happened more than a day ago; one of the stumps still bled. That was the blood Telemakos had smelled. He suddenly understood why Medraut had not wanted him to witness the beating: not that it had itself been horrific, but that it was vile injustice inflicted on someone who was already enduring an incomprehensible suffering.

  Medraut walked forward, Telemakos at his side. Telemakos glanced up at his father again, apprehensive. Medraut’s narrowed eyes still burned coldly with disgust and disdain. He let go of his son’s shoulder and held up his hand to the travelers, his open palm facing them as though in greeting. He stood so, impassive but for his accusing eyes, until two of them noticed him and came forward a little.

  “What is that?” one asked.

  “The staff of Asclepius. He is a physician.”

  Medraut held his open hand to Telemakos briefly, so that he could see what the others had seen. There was a blue tattoo on the palm of Medraut’s left hand, a snake entwined about a branch.

  Medraut was obviously foreign; his skin was so white you could pick him out in a crowd across the Cathedral Square. But merchants bargained wordlessly all the time, and because Medraut had approached with a gesture and not a word, the travelers assumed he could not speak, or did not speak their language. They talked between themselves as though they thought he could not hear, either. Telemakos marveled at their bland stupidity.

  “What spleen, to think he will find work here!”

  “Well, Butala does need that stump seen to.”

  “The master won’t put out much for the doctoring of a faithless bond servant. See what the man will take as payment.”

  “I’m not paying him!”

  The other rolled his eyes. “Mother of God. Only find out what he’ll cost.”

  Medraut spat in the dust at their feet.

  Telemakos said sharply, “He’s not asking for payment, only for permission.”

  They looked at Telemakos in surprise, and then one of them waved Medraut forward. “Please, do your worst.”

  Medraut turned to Telemakos and held up the blue serpent again. Then he pointed to the well in the center of the grove. He unslung his bow and quiver from his back and handed them to Telemakos.

  “Could I help, though?” Telemakos offered.

  Medraut pointed him away again, seriously, then turned his back on him. Telemakos went to sit by the well to wait for him.

  There were three others on a stone bench there, two hunched tensely together in conversation, and one patently miserable with his head on his knees and his hands held tightly over his ears. At his feet lay a huge black cat with curling tufts of hair springing from its ears. Telemakos suddenly recognized them all, as though the trick to a puzzle box had just dawned on him and all the interlocking pieces made sense and fit together cleverly. This band was that of Anako, the archon from Deire, on his way home.

  Telemakos said to the cowering boy, “Has the cat a name?”

  It was the boy he had seen in the New Palace, with the thin moustache. He looked up at Telemakos without taking his hands from his ears. “What are you?” he asked disdainfully. “Why should I answer idle questions of someone else’s servant?”

  “I don’t mind whether or not you speak to me,” Telemakos said truthfully, not caring what they took him for. “I only wanted to look at the cat.”

  The boy let go of one of his ears so that he could reach down to scratch the cat between its own fantastic ones.

  “She’s called Chariclea,” the boy said. The cat was still muzzled. “Go ahead and touch her. She can’t hurt you; she doesn’t have any claws.”

  Telemakos knelt next to the cat. It looked as though it weighed nearly as much as he did; it was as big as a hunting dog. Telemakos ran both hands down its back. Its fur was sable silk.

  “Is it a caracal? I thought only their ears were black.”

  “She’s a black caracal. She’s a freak, like you.”

  “I’m not a freak,” said Telemakos mildly. He was so accustomed to this kind of jibe that he expected it. “I’m half-breed.”

  “You’ve the hair of an albino.”

  “I’m not albino. It’s just light-colored. My father’s hair looks like this.”

  “What’s your father?”

  “The doctor.”

  Telemakos glanced over his shoulder. Medraut had built a small fire and was kneeling over it, busy with something. Telemakos quickly looked away again. It would be bad enough having to listen, he knew, they all knew, without watching as well. He crouched low over the big cat’s neck, raking gentle fingers through its exquisite fur. “Oh, you beauty
, you lovely, you treasure!” he whispered to it.

  The caracal stretched out its front legs blissfully, kneading at the ground. Its feet were toeless stumps, like hands with the fingers lopped off.

  “Poor paws,” said Telemakos.

  “She doesn’t care. She was never hurt, not much; they drugged her for the operation. Lucky old Chariclea. They didn’t bother putting Butala to sleep.”

  “Ras Meder won’t hurt him more than he has to,” Telemakos said, an empty reassurance. He was fairly certain that Medraut was going to have to sear the boy’s wounds to seal them, and that he did not have the time nor the herbs nor the equipment he needed to do it painlessly.

  Telemakos and his sullen companion bore the worst of Butala’s screaming each in his own way, the cat boy bent over with his head wrapped in his arms again, and Telemakos with his face buried against the caracal’s side and his arms locked around its neck. When it was quiet again Telemakos raised his head, somewhat chastened to remember how he had struggled against Medraut’s hand over his eyes, when here he was covering them anyway.

  “What did he do?” Telemakos asked. “What did he do that your master had to cut off his hands as punishment?”

  “He didn’t do anything,” the boy said, his voice savage. “He heard something. Now no one else will hear it.”

  “How did he hear it? Why was he there?”

  “We all heard it, whatever it was,” the boy said. “Anako was speaking Greek, was he not, as he always does when he doesn’t want us to know what he’s talking about, only afterward his secretary happened to remember that Butala understands Greek. So Butala had his tongue cut out.”

  “But why his hands?”

  “You called your father ras, are you a prince, then? Is royalty all so stupid? So that he can’t write, or gesture.”

  “Well, your master won’t get much use of him with no hands, will he?” Telemakos said darkly.

  The cat boy stared at him witheringly. “Butala wasn’t ever used for his hands.” He let that fall between them like lead through water. Then he added, “He’s just a porter.”