“He’s dead now,” Telemakos stated frankly.
I hesitated. “He was wounded in the battle of Camlan,” I said. “He was wounded in body and spirit, and we lost him after we buried our father.”
Telemakos sank both hands deep in the dark fur of the lion skin, and stood silent. At last he pushed himself away from the wall and said evenly, “Look, here is my mother.”
Turunesh was older than Priamos and I, younger than Medraut. She stood tall and calm. Her hair was fixed in many tiny plaits that lay close against her scalp, following the curve of her head, then billowing loose at her neck in an ebony cloud. Telemakos went to stand close to her side, beneath her arm, and she held him against her.
“This is my mother, Turunesh Kidane,” said Telemakos.
She looked me up and down, taking in my travel-stained clothes and salt-spattered boots. “Peace to you, Princess Goewin,” she said, in accented Latin. “Peace to you, little sister. You’ve been lost.”
She held out her hand, and I took it. She touched my cheek to hers. I sighed.
“I am a disagreeable guest,” I said. “I bring only evil news, and I have just had a roaring quarrel with my fiancé before half the imperial court.”
“So did your brother, six years ago, when Constantine arrived.” Turunesh laughed, then stopped suddenly. She lifted her hand from her son’s shoulder to smooth down his thick, luminous hair. “Have you brought me news of Medraut?”
“I cannot tell—”
Again I hesitated. I hated what I would have to tell her. Throughout the last day I spent with Medraut he had not spoken a single word aloud.
Turunesh said gently, “It does not come as such a shock. I thought it must be so, or you would not have traveled alone. Tell me later, perhaps.”
I sighed again. “I mean, I truly cannot tell,” I said. “I do not know what happened to him. I think Medraut took his own life. I don’t know. He’s gone,”
I dropped Turunesh’s hand and knelt by her side, so that I was level with Telemakos. He turned his head toward me. He kept his eyes politely lowered, his expression quiet and still. I, too, touched his bright hair.
“I would never have seen him anyway,” Telemakos said.
“Ask Ferem to bring our supper in the garden,” his mother told him. “And then coffee. You may eat with us, child, if you do not talk, but straight to bed when the coffee is brought out. You’ve been playing with the emperor’s monkeys again, haven’t you? Go take a bath.”
Telemakos bowed his head, then turned quickly and ran past us into the house. I watched him go, my nephew.
We shared a meal without speaking. Darkness fell suddenly, and the butler Ferem lit lanterns that stood in standards about the garden. The night seemed full of little noises: the soft, wet pip-pip of the ornamental fish breathing at the surface of the granite pool at my back, the slight ripple of the water as they dived again; moths and lizards fluttering and jumping in the thatched awning above our heads, the rustle of wind in the leaves of the giant sycamores. I dreaded my morning meeting with Constantine.
Ferem cleared away the baskets that had held the flat injera bread, and set before Turunesh a tray heavy with strange equipment: a small burner, a round and tall-necked earthen jug, a mortar, pans, and tiny earthen cups. The butler put a hand on Telemakos’s shoulder, and the child stood up and let himself be led away to bed without protest.
I opened my mouth to ask, “What happens now?” and what came out was, “What happened in Himyar?”
“We were at war with them for seventeen years,” Turunesh answered. “Himyar has alternated as our enemy and our ally longer than Aksum has been Christian, three hundred years or more. When their king began persecuting the Aksumite Christians there, Caleb defeated him and made the region a protectorate under a native viceroy. But the Aksumite settlers did not like Caleb’s choice, so they threw the viceroy out and elected one of their own to take his place.”
“Abreha.”
“Yes.”
“Why was Abreha in Himyar?”
“Caleb had sent him as a translator.”
Have no trust in translators, I thought.
I asked aloud, “So then Caleb sent Priamos with an army to bring down Abreha?”
“Not at first. He sent his own son, Aryat, and Aryat was slain by Abreha. Then he sent Priamos’s elder brother, Hector. Hector’s force rebelled against him; he was very young. He was murdered by his own officers. Priamos’s army fought after Hector’s, and Abreha defeated him.”
It was strange to sit in the dark courtyard, both of us tight with grief, and calmly discuss a war that had ended three years ago.
“They struck a truce,” Turunesh finished. “Priamos was spared so that he might carry Abreha’s message back to the emperor Caleb.”
“Cynric used him in that exact way after Camlan,” I said. “He was the only one of my father’s men who knew anything of the Saxon tongue.”
“That will not help his reputation at all,” Turunesh commented, lighting the burner. “‘Have no trust in translators,’ Caleb used to say.”
She blew gently on the flames in the brazier.
“Now watch,” Turunesh said, straightening. “Let’s no longer speak of Himyar. I am going to make you coffee. We’ll drink in memory of your brother. He once told me he would give away a kingdom if it meant he might share another cup of coffee with me.”
I saw her smiling over the blue and yellow flames.
“What is it?”
“A mild stimulant. It grows wild on the highland hillsides; we roast and grind the seeds, then steep them to make a drink. Your brother hated it. But he liked the ceremony. Only a woman may make coffee. Watch.”
She was busy as she spoke, deftly sorting the seeds. They rattled musically against the earthen pan she held them in; the flames of the burner whiffled and leapt. I could not ever remember being so aware of the light, quiet sounds of a garden at night.
Perhaps because I was listening so intently, perhaps because the cool highland air and rustling sycamores and bitter scent of roasting coffee were so strange to me, I heard a thing Turunesh did not hear. Behind me, below the gentle breathing of the fish, I heard the gentle breathing of another small creature. Turunesh began to pulverize the seeds in the mortar. I lowered my head, slowly, and glanced sideways back over my arm.
There was a border of tall flowers along one edge of the pool; their leaves were nearly black in the darkness, and all was black beneath their leaves. I sat with my head bent, as though lost in thought, and let my eyes adjust to the dark.
Turunesh lifted the roasting pan from the burner and set the water in the fat pot to boil. The flames soared, crackling around the bottom of the jug. Their sudden flaring lit a shape beneath the leaves with a faint edge of silver, and for one second I could see that Telemakos lay there as stone himself, his chin resting on his hands and his eyes closed. I only saw him for a second. He seemed at ease lying in the soil beneath the tall flowers, and he might have been asleep; but something in the alert angle of his still head told me that he was wide awake, and listening, listening.
For a few moments I did not move my head either, so that I should not let him know I had discovered him. I had seen Telemakos take enough mild blows and rebukes in one day that I had no heart to call him out. He could listen if he liked.
“What is that smell?” I murmured.
“The coffee?”
“More like perfume. Familiar …”
“Frankincense, perhaps? There is a plantation on the hillside above this suburb. Our priests burn it as incense; your own may do the same.”
“Yes, so they do. I recognize it now.”
I sat sorting out the strange smells and sounds. The light, even breathing went on steadily behind me, scarcely perceptible. But I did not notice when it stopped. Telemakos was not there when we went to bed: I never heard him coming or going. He moved with the sure and absolute silence of a leopard stalking its prey.
In the cathedral the next morning the frankincense was overpowering. Clouds of it rose from the censers swung by the priests in their red-bordered robes; the gilt wings of the angels painted on the ceiling seemed to float in haze. Constantine stood at my side as we listened to the morning service.
The chanting, the drumbeat and rattle of sistrums, was strange to my ears. I stood looking up at the mild, wide-eyed, host that flew across the vaulted ceiling on gold wings. As the service ended and the assembly began to process out, Constantine whispered in Latin, close to my ear, “Marry me now.”
I had to bite the knuckle of my index finger, hard, to keep from bursting into laughter. It did not seem to merit an answer, there and then.
“Marry me here, in this church, before the rains end.”
No. I shaped the word soundlessly with my lips.
Constantine tilted his head, pretentious in his Aksumite beard and head cloth. “What did you say?” he whispered.
“No!” I said aloud. All the people around gave me oblique glances and quickly looked away again. I took a deep breath of the cloying incense. We followed the priests out into the misty highland morning.
In the time it took us to cross the cathedral square, Constantine and I had collected a following of what seemed like dozens of beggars: an eyeless, limbless group of mutilated men, some young, some older. They called to me in Greek and Ethiopic.
“Sister! Sister! Foreign lady, sister!”
They reached beseeching hands but did not try to touch me, not daring to come into range of the ceremonial spear bearers.
I turned frowning to Constantine and asked, “Why are the beggars all so badly maimed?”
“They are veterans of the Himyar,” he answered briefly. “I have tried to find employment and hospice for them, but there are too many. Ras Priamos’s legacy to Aksum.”
“The emperor Caleb’s legacy, surely,” I corrected.
“Of course, you’re right. Himyar embitters me. Caleb depleted his nation’s treasury and youth in conflict there, and I am left to sweep up the debris.”
I wondered what he had done. He had not held this office for more than a half year, after all. Anything he did for Aksum he might also do for Britain.
“Tell me,” I said, testing him.
“I’ve converted the old palace to an asylum for returning soldiers. I donated a boatload of my father’s tin to pay for it.”
“That is very generous of your father,” I said.
He did not answer that. We walked the rest of the way to the New Palace without a word.
We broke our fast together in a small room that was bright with bowls of flowers. I thought of Constantine’s proposal, and it made me want to laugh again. I bit my lip, embarrassed. He was trying to be courteous.
“What have you done for Aksum that you are proudest of?” I asked, trying hard myself.
“I have stopped the Beja tribes skirmishing over where their emeralds are sold, and curbed the banditry along the Salt Road,” he answered. “But I am most proud of this.”
He undid a purse by his side and passed to me a small and shining coin. It was curiously beautiful, copper daubed with gold, a broad cross imprinted with a sunburst at its heart.