Coalition of Lions (11 page)

“You can be sure my cousins and I nearly died of fright when first this tunnel blew our lights out,” came her calm voice out of the dark.

Telemakos laughed.

“Hold the lamp and I’ll hold your hand, child. Princess, take my other hand.”

Her hands were steady. We walked forward in the darkness.

The true entrance to the tomb of the false door was sealed with an iron lock. Telemakos leaned against my waist while Turunesh unfastened the lock and opened the stone door. A smell of herbs and damp earth hit us. It was not a foul smell, but a strange smell to find in the still air of the stone underground.

“No one will come here,” Turunesh said. “The vaults are locked against robbers, and the cemetery is patrolled above-ground. I will have to bribe the warden, I think, before I will get in to you from the other side.”

“Do you mean for us to shut ourselves in the vault?” I said, as lightly as I could.

“Stay in the corridor unless you need to hide. I can’t believe anyone will come down here, but all the wealthy villas have access to these tunnels, and I don’t know who else. The door to the vault will not open from the inside, though, so do not shut yourself in unless you are very frightened. Will you be all right without a light? You will have no means to keep one aflame in this corridor.”

I sensed her moving close to me and felt her brush against my skirt as she took her son in her arms. She whispered something at his ear, and he laughed again.

Turunesh stood, and reached for my hand one last time. “Princess, all will be well. Our household will soon discover you missing, but Ferem knows you are with me and will keep them hushed. I packed the boy’s nurse off to visit her mother. There is no one else who could guess.”

“Wazeb,” I said. “He brought the map.”

“I think the tame lion is something more than message bearer in this intrigue,” Turunesh said carefully. “I think he would sooner cast dust on your trail than send dogs after you. He has reason to hope you succeed in your quest. He awaits the advent of his own kingship. He knows what he is doing.”

Turunesh squeezed my hand a final time.

“‘Love is strong as death,’” she said. “‘Jealousy is cruel as the grave.’ If I cannot leave you light, I leave you the Song of Songs.”

She went away up the stairs. For a moment we watched the glow as she lit her lamp in the upper hall, and then it was dark again.

Telemakos did not allow me to brood. He rummaged in the food bag and chattered and demanded that I tell him stories. He had invented a game, remember? Where you traced a picture of an animal in the palm of the other person’s hand and tried to guess what it was. He was astonishingly good at this, his invisible sketches quick and simple, focused on the most important characteristics of a thing: whiskers, fins, wings; a giraffe’s long neck; an elephant’s long nose; a lion’s mane.

He was good at guessing, too. I bent over his hand and drew a strange shape there.

“Winged serpent,” he said immediately. “Cheater. That’s not a real animal. What’s this—”

His design lost me in its complexity. “I give up.”

“Map of the world.”

I burst out laughing.

Eventually Telemakos fell asleep, suddenly sagging against my side in the middle of a story. I folded a blanket over his small shoulders, and over my lap. I slept well when I slept at last.

But I woke suddenly with the strongest, strangest sense of loss and betrayal I have ever felt. It was like the lingering of a nightmare, except I had not been dreaming, that I could remember. I sat up in the dark.

“Telemakos?”

There was no light at all. He had been sleeping with his head in my lap, but he was not there now. I brushed my hands blindly over the cool stone on either side of me.

“Telemakos!” I hissed. I did not dare to shout. Suddenly I did not like the sound of my voice in that still, closed place.

He was gone.

A warren of tunnels
, he had said. One of them was supposed to lead to a city eighty miles away. Where in blazes had he gone—I did not even have a light. If I set out after him, we would both be lost.

“Telemakos!” I called in panic.

I called and called, softly, as I had called hopelessly to his father in the caves of Elder Field, half a year and half the world away. The memory of it was so vivid that for a time I did not know where I was. I stood again deep in the high king’s copper mines, my family lying still and shrouded at my back, calling and calling my brother’s name into the unanswering earth.

I cannot, I cannot be doing this again. I cannot lose my brother and his son in the same insane way—

I called Telemakos for an hour, perhaps; who knows how long. Then I threw myself on the floor in despair and cried until I could not breathe.

He came back, of course. I did not hear him or know he was there until he touched me, reaching out a hand lightly to make certain where I was, then locking his small arms around my neck affectionately.

“Goewin, Goewin! What happened? Why are you crying so hard?”

“You miserable sneaking little weasel!” I gasped, hugging him against me so fiercely that he choked, and tried to break free. “Pestilent son of a demon! Where have you been all this time? How did you find your way back? Good God, how you’ve frightened me!”

“I’m not so stupid,” he said defensively, and put into my hands a bobbin of his mother’s spinning, half filled with fine wool thread.

“You came prepared,” I spat through my teeth. “What if the line had broken?”

“It’s quite strong,” came his clear, confident voice in the dark; “try it.”

I tugged at a length of wool. He was right.

“Anyway, I could smell where our camp is. The tomb’s got such a different air to the tunnels; and Mother packed raisin cakes for us.”

“Give me your hand,” I said firmly.

I found it in the dark, offered willingly. I looped the thread around his wrist, three times, five times, a dozen times.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Binding you to me,” I said sharply, pulling the knots tight and beginning to loop the thread around my own hand as well.

“Do not—”

He tried to pull his hand away, too late; I held him fast.

“I won’t leave you again, I promise!”

“You will not. I will see to it.”

Our wrists were back to back now, webbed in wool floss.

“Is that too tight?”

“I’m all right,” Telemakos answered meekly. But instead of trying to pull away again, he curled himself against my side in the dark and finally whispered, “I’m sorry, my lady.”

We had no way of telling the hour. I tried to make Telemakos eat and drink sparingly. Keeping him tied to me began to prove unimaginably awkward, but I would sooner have been stripped and flogged in the cathedral square than I would have let him go again.

We were asleep when Turunesh came for us.

“Let’s go,” she said in urgent Ethiopic. She repeated the command in Greek, and then in Latin. “Let’s go, let us go, let us go. My father is growing suspicious, wondering why he has not seen you. I don’t want to compromise his standing in the Council, or with Ella Amida; better he worry, knowing nothing, than be cast as a collaborator. Ai, this is proving more difficult than I thought. I had a time persuading the gatekeeper to let me in the cemetery so late at night.”

She closed the door of the tomb and fastened it, moving with sure efficiency in the dark. Then she tried to take my hand.

“Mercy on us, what is this?”

She plucked at the wool that bound Telemakos’s wrist to mine.

“Your son decided to go exploring,” I uttered through tight lips.

“Ai, you wretched child!” she exclaimed. “I’ll have you whipped! This is not a game!”

Briefly, Turunesh tried to unpick the knots, but she quickly dropped our hands and gave up. “What a tangle! Come up out of the dark and we’ll cut you apart.”

Turunesh steered us around like a team of oxen, and set us walking ahead of her up the stairs. I could hear her hand brushing lightly upon the walls behind me as she felt her way. “We are nearly there,” she said. “I will not make a light; it will only blind us and hurt your eyes. I’ve horses waiting for us at the reservoir at Mai Shum. I hope; I left them unguarded. We must reach Adwa tonight and be away to the east tomorrow. Were you able to sleep?”

“A little. How long has it been since you left us?”

“Just more than a day. Look, the far stairway. You see the stars where the door stands open at the top?”

We came out into the cemetery. The moonless night was alluringly beautiful; the spangled sky seemed like the brightest thing I had ever seen. The city below the Necropolis glittered also. I could make out the pattern of the lighted streets in the market area, where people still shopped and sold by the light of oil lamps and torches. Turunesh led us to a decorative arbor, and we sat in its shelter on a marble bench overlooking the sparkling city. She dug in her satchel and finally produced a flint fire-lighter.

“I haven’t a knife. This will have to do.”

When the wool cord was pulled taut beneath the flint, it seemed to grow razor-sharp, and Telemakos screwed his eyes shut and turned his face away, silent and cowed, as his mother and I took turns at sawing us free.

“Maybe we won’t have you whipped after all,” she said at last, with sympathy, when finally Telemakos and I were parted from each other. “Remind me to take a knife with us when we leave Adwa.”

Telemakos began rather desperately to pull the frayed and tangled threads away from his wrist.

“Don’t drop those on the ground,” Turunesh warned. “I don’t want to leave tracks.”

She put the flint away and produced an earthen flask stoppered with cork.

“Have some coffee,” she said. Telemakos glanced up at her then with a hopeful half-smile, rallying. “It should be hot still. Some punishment, eh? This is no precedent, boy, don’t expect more tomorrow. But you need to wake properly, if we are to start.”

The three of us shared the bitter drink in the dark, beneath the shadow of the carved monuments to kings long dead.

“Will we be followed, do you think?” I asked.

“No one is hunting, yet,” Turunesh answered. “The gatekeeper to the Necropolis thinks I have arranged a lover’s tryst here tonight! He will pretend not to see us coming and going. You look a little like a boy with your head wrapped in a turban. Tie your shamma so, and bind your skirts at the knee. The bow you carry will help fool him, as well; you will seem to be what he expects to see. Give your bundles to the child, so he may be taken as your porter.”

We looked at Telemakos, quietly sipping his coffee, and relishing it. His hair caught the starlight.

Turunesh sighed. “Have you another scarf, Princess?” she said. “Half the city will recognize him if we don’t hide his hair.”

Telemakos looked up.

“You don’t need to hide my hair,” he said. “No one will see me.”

“What do you mean, boy?”

His incomplete smile suddenly reminded me of his father.

“Let me go ahead on my own. I’ll meet you at Mai Shum,” he said. “I promise.”

Turunesh threw up her hands in baffled despair, but I nodded in agreement.

“Trust him,” I said. “No one will see him, and he won’t get lost.”

Telemakos stood up, pulled his satchel strap over his head, and handed me the bag. Then he took off his shamma, folded it carefully, and laid it in his mother’s lap.

“It gets in my way,” he explained, his hands resting on the cloth in her lap.

“Take care, love,” Turunesh said softly.

Telemakos did not answer. He leaned close to his mother to touch his cheek to hers and kissed her, then turned away and cantered lightly down the hill toward the gate. We saw him go, but we did not hear him. He did not make a sound.

T
ELEM AKOS WAS WAITING
for us with the horses. He was there ahead of us, as he had promised. He rode with me, before me in the saddle, and none of us ever said anything more about the tunnels.

We left the city of Aksum. We followed the graveled high road to Adwa, three hours’ journey under the thick and luminous stars. We reached Kidane’s country estate in time to sleep before the sun rose, but we did not dare remain throughout the day. We were still close enough to Aksum that we could easily be tracked. We studied the
Itinerary
over our hasty breakfast.

“There are two ways to go,” I said. “One of them looks twice the distance, but the other follows the main road. If we take the longer route we can leave the highway today.”

“Good,” said Turunesh. “Your white face will be remarked by everyone who passes you.”

We took one of the farm ponies for Telemakos and set out. The roadside sparked with the wild gold of Meskal daisies, the bright asters of the Aksumite highlands. Terraced fields sloped toward woodland where coffee grew wild and monkeys danced across the treetops.

“I want to see lions,” Telemakos said.

“I don’t!” his mother exclaimed. “What shall we do if we come by a pack of lionesses hunting, hope the princess has enough arrows in her quiver to take them all herself?”

“Maybe she could. She is Ras Meder’s sister, and he could. His name was lion.”

“Medraut means marksman,” I said abruptly, “not lion.”

“The lion is lord of the land. Meder. It doesn’t mean lion, but it
is.
” Telemakos spoke with absolute conviction; of course, it was his own name, as well.

“Where do you hear such things?” his mother asked mildly.

He tilted his head. “I hear everything.”

We slept through the heat of the day in the village at Hawelti, then came through the trees at night. We saw nothing of the forest, but it breathed with rustling night birds and the cries of foxes and hyenas. The strange hours we were keeping put Telemakos in a fey temper. Turunesh worried constantly about attack from wild beasts. Once we were beyond easy reach of Aksum we stopped traveling by night.

Soon the road coiled around mountain peaks that matched endlessly away from us on all sides. The air grew rarer, and now that we were well beyond the merchant ways, the road was no longer well maintained. The recent rains had done it no good either, and in one place it was so badly damaged that there were ruts in it up to Telemakos’s chest. Country children wearing crosses of woven grass, like Wazeb’s, helped lead us through the worst sections of the trail. Their parents offered us fried bread and handfuls of spiced, roasted grain. Everyone we met was fascinated by Telemakos, more so even than by me.