“Damn, damn, damn,” repeated his small sister.
“Shhh,” Telemakos said, mortified. She would repeat anything. “That was naughty of me. Kiss my poor fingers.”
He got the door open, but Menelik would not come out. The lion stayed pressed against the back of the cage, cramped and miserable. Telemakos had to crawl in halfway after him, shuffling bent low, with Athena clinging to his neck like a bag of lead weights.
“Ah, Menelik, Menelik, my bold one, my brave one,” Telemakos sang under his breath, fondling the lion behind its ears and kissing its dry nose. “Come now, it’s all right, you are the prince of lions—”
Telemakos’s head was pressed down by the top of the cage. As he hooked the lead into Menelik’s collar, for a single airless second he was imprisoned again, held helpless and blind by hands he could not see. He struggled, and banged his head on the hutch. Dazed, he backed out quickly, still gripping the lion’s lead, and Menelik followed. Telemakos sat back on his heels, clinging to Athena and breathing hard, awash with relief to find himself back in al-Muza.
Telemakos looked across the edge of the sand at the city before him. He was weighed down by the baby on his hip and the satchel over his shoulder, and his single hand was going to have to be wholly devoted to controlling the lion. Maybe I should wait for the porters, he thought.
He glanced at the empty cage and slammed it shut with a sharp kick.
“Good-bye, traveling hutch. Never again.”
They crossed the mooring beach and set out to discover al-Muza.
X
THE HANGED MAN
THE AIR SMELLED OF sweet incense and stinking fish, like unrefined ambergris. All the walls and domes were washed with gypsum plaster, and the city sparkled as though it lay beneath a film of salt. Deire must have been like this, Telemakos thought, our port city lost to plague. White Deire, they used to call it.
The lion cut a path for Telemakos through the suq markets, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Athena kept her head up and alert, staring at purple men beating cloth with indigo, or blindfolded camels turning oil presses. In an alley of saddlers’ stalls and shops, Telemakos stopped to examine a row of colored belts and scabbards, considering a new strap for Athena’s slipping harness. He was kneeling before the vendor’s carpet with Menelik’s lead held down beneath one foot when he caught the scent of basil, freshly broken. He tensed himself for conflict.
A clutch of curious local children had gathered in his wake. Now they were passing fragrant sprigs of green surreptitiously among themselves, tucking it up one another’s sleeves and behind their ears. They spoke a local dialect of Ethiopic so mixed with South Arabian that at first Telemakos could make no sense of them at all, but he recognized what they were doing: warding off ill fortune. He stood up and turned to face them. Taking care not to touch his eyes, he shaded his face with his wrist at his hairline and his head bent, so that his terrible dead man’s gaze did not fall on anyone. It was the safest way to approach a host of strange children.
Athena copied him, covering her face with both hands. Then she suddenly threw her arms wide and announced, “Baby!” She reached up to pull at her brother’s fingers so the others could see his face. “Boy!”
Everybody laughed.
“Aksumite?” a girl asked in comprehensible Greek, the common language of the Red Sea. She wore a blue headscarf sewn with a fringe of jingling pale gold shells across her forehead. “We thought you were Socotran. There is a township on the island where all the people have blue eyes.”
“What a fearful lot of basil the other Socotrans must consume,” Telemakos said.
One or two of them sheepishly tossed aside their sprigs.
“The king’s wife is of that village,” continued the shell girl, “and you do look like the king’s children.” She flicked a finger at Athena’s bracelet. “Your baby sister could be Queen Muna’s daughter come to life again. The princess was born here, four years ago, her last child; the queen spent her confinement here instead of San’a because she had such a craving for fish. I remember when the najashi came for her, he held up the baby on the terrace of the archon’s mansion and said that her name was Amirah. My mother took me to see. They are all dead now, my mother, the king’s children, Queen Muna’s children, and his first queen Khirash’s children, Asad his heir and his favorite; they all died of plague.” She twisted her mouth wryly, as if to show how little this meant to anyone. “You know how it is.”
Telemakos did not know how it was. He looked down briefly and pressed his own lips together in grim sympathy.
“What are you buying, then, Aksumite?” asked an older boy who towered over the others. “A sword belt?”
“A muzzle,” Telemakos answered coolly. He knelt again and picked up Menelik’s lead. The children all looked down at Menelik, who had been lying quietly in the shade beneath a screen hung with boot laces and sandal straps.
“That’s not a dog,” one said, and they edged away.
Telemakos gave them his father’s crooked, incomplete smile, and said amiably, “Maybe you can help me. I need a tailor to mend my sister’s harness, but I do not know who would best do the work.”
“Oh, that’s business for the girls—” A boy whose face was cratered with smallpox scars started to walk away, but the big one asked suddenly, “Is the lion tamed? Will it let me touch it?”
Telemakos noted that they were simply a gathered audience, not a real gang; they had no leader.
“You can hold him while the harness is being mended, if you like,” Telemakos said. “I’ll have enough to do with the baby.”
“Not I, thank you!”
The other boys laughed at the tall one. Telemakos let his breath out slowly in a private sigh of relief. They would not mob him now.
They gave Telemakos conflicting directions. The girl with the shell scarf and the big boy argued briefly in their strange dialect, and were told off by the belt salesman for treading on his carpet. “Step back,” Telemakos told them, pulling Menelik up close to him, and of the merchant he asked politely, “Which of them speaks truly, sir?”
“Iskinder will lead you aright,” said the scabbard seller, pointing to the tall one. “Call him Alexander, if you prefer Greek. His uncle sends me my best customers.”
Telemakos looked the children over as he fell in step beside tall Iskinder. They were all reasonably well dressed. The little boys wore wooden daggers, and the older boys wore real ones, in wide, curved, ornate scabbards. The girls carried shopping baskets. Everyone’s wrists and ears rang with silver jewelry. Gedar’s children would have looked ragged and beggarly among them.
“I’d forgotten the smell of cinnamon till I landed here today,” said Telemakos. “All our ports have been closed for the last three years. Your country seems very prosperous to me.”
“So it is,” said tall Iskinder. “Arabia the Fortunate. But you did not see it in the great sickness, when there were not enough of us to bury our own dead. People dumped corpses in the sea. Everything stank.”
“Ships still came in, but the king stayed away,” said the girl, shaking her head so that her shells chittered. “The najashi hid in the Hanish Islands for half a year, when plague was here, so he would not die with the rest of his countrymen. All his children died. He thought they would be all right in San’a, in the mountains, but the frankincense merchants brought the sickness there as well.”
“He has no heir,” said the scarred one. “The najashi would send all the frankincense and salt back where it came from if it could bring his sons to life again.”
Telemakos could not tell, from their talk, if they approved of their king or not. When they spoke of their dead it was with a resigned and eerie indifference that was alien to him.
“These suqs used to be much more crowded,” said the shell girl. “My grandmother likes it better now. Doing the shopping is like a long day of visiting. The merchants chatter at you till your ears drop off, and give you coffee. It will take you most of the afternoon to agree on a price for your baby carrier.”
They led Telemakos by the city’s secret ways, along passages so narrow that the ibex horns guarding the rooftops against ill spirit met overhead like the bars of a twisted cage.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos brushed close to the white walls on his right so that Athena would not hit the building on the left, and when the sunlight caught them between lanes, he found his shamma glinting with gypsum. Menelik’s fur, too, was frosted with it.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos, absorbed in mentally mapping the intricate pattern of al-Muza’s alleyways, realized suddenly that one of his guides was talking to him.
“Why are you in Himyar?” Iskinder asked for the third time.
“I’m to deliver this lion to the najashi. It’s a gift from the emperor of Aksum.”
“Are you employed by the emperor?” Iskinder’s voice cracked on the final word of each sentence he uttered.
The group emerged all at once into a wide, bright plaza. It was noisy with fountains and traffic and seagulls crying and the mourning warble of pigeons.
“Are you employed by the emperor?”
The square was lined with ceremonial thrones like those on the road leading into the imperial city of Aksum, each carved of Aksumite basalt, black against the white lime and white sand of al-Muza’s walls and streets.
“Are you employed by the emperor?” Iskinder repeated patiently.
“Only to deliver the lion,” Telemakos said. “They sent me because I raised it. It was an honor to be sent, but not an obligation.”
There was a faint, ugly smell about the place that reminded Telemakos of the bloody days immediately following his accident.
“You’re lucky,” Iskinder said. “It’s good to have connections. I mean to join the city guard here in another year or so, but I have no one to recommend me, so there is no reason they should take me in.”
“Of course they will take you in,” said one of the other boys. “You are a giant. So what if you’re afraid of that lion?”
“I did not see you volunteer to hold it,” Iskinder retorted. Telemakos pulled Menelik against his thigh and brushed glitter from the lion’s cheeks and whiskers.
“Poor feet,” Athena remarked.
“What did you say, Tena?”
The girl with the shells suddenly spoke quietly in Telemakos’s ear. “You might like to cover your sister’s eyes. There was an execution yesterday, and it may frighten her.”
She turned aside and pointed skyward.
“Mother of God,” Telemakos swore in a whisper, and Menelik pressed even tighter against his leg as Telemakos jerked up the lion’s lead so he could pull the end of his shamma over Athena’s head.
Not three paces away from them, but above them, was the man who was to have been killed the day before. He was still alive. His execution had been carried out, indeed, but he was still alive. He had been crucified, nailed to a length of mast wood and left to die, and he hung above the street like a parody of the young Christian god, struggling and gasping in the scorching meridian sun, hours after he should have died of thirst or shock.
