“Open box,” Athena said.
“Shh,” he told her. “I don’t need your instructions.”
“Table box,” she said. “Open najashi’s table.”
Telemakos stared at her. She knew this place, though Telemakos did not. She played in Abreha’s office for an hour every morning.
“Najashi’s box,” Athena repeated impatiently, and reached forward to smack the low tabletop with her slim brown hand. “Open box.”
Telemakos bent to look closely at the lacquered ebony. The marquetry panel in the center of the table formed a lid over a hidden well, like a large writing case. Telemakos moved the dishes aside.
“How does it work, Tena?” he whispered, aware of the soldiers standing guard in the outer room. “How did the najashi open it?”
She scrabbled her slender fingers lightly along the table’s edge. She knew what she was looking for, but perhaps it was by accident that she found it. The panel sprang free of the worktop.
“Open box,” Athena said with satisfaction. “See Boy’s animals.”
Inside, on top of a sheaf of neatly sorted documents, lay those finished maps Telemakos had sketched from the decaying wax the Star Master called the Plague Tablets.
Telemakos picked up the first sheet. It was his own drawing, the one with the ink-spattered pelicans that seemed to fly through a rainstorm across the top of the page. Someone else had written on it since then. The nameless coves and bays had been labeled. It had become a map of Hanish al-Kabir, Gebre Meskal’s prison island. Telemakos had not recognized it by itself, separated from its archipelago, its outline grossly distorted by the untrained hand that made the wax sketch.
Telemakos narrowed his eyes and knelt studying the drawing like a puzzle, until Athena began to squirm and grab for the papyrus sheet.
“Tena’s. Tena’s animals.”
“These aren’t animals,” Telemakos whispered. “Shh. Be quiet and I’ll tell you. Do you see these chevrons? These are Gebre Meskal’s guardian ships. These crosses are the najashi’s men, soldiers, hiding in the back bays of al-Kabir.”
The plans were crisscrossed with scratchings-out and scrawled notes. No landing here, said one, and another simply, Dry. It seemed clear to Telemakos what they meant. Abreha wanted to place an ambush around the prison but could not find any place to put his men ashore, or a water supply for them.
“Boats,” Athena said, diving toward the map that lay beneath the one Telemakos held. “More boats.”
“Those…” He studied the notes scrawled on this one, and managed to keep his voice low. “Those are Gebre Meskal’s boats, but some of them have got the najashi’s soldiers in them….”
Suddenly he realized what the Plague Tablets were. The crumbling, crude sketches he had been copying were Abreha’s only maps of the Hanish Archipelago. The najashi had made them while he was in his self-imposed exile there, with an eye to invading the islands as soon as he and his men were able.
Telemakos was aghast to think how diligently he had been hurrying this project along. Numb with disbelief, he moved the maps aside and reached for the wad of palm and parchment that lay below them.
Abreha stood like a statue in the door to his study. Telemakos looked up. He did not know how long the najashi had been watching him. Telemakos suddenly became aware that his own face was frozen in a blistering glare of discovery and accusation: his lips were pressed together in a thin line, his nostrils pinched, one eyebrow cocked in concentration. His expression must radiate suspicion. Telemakos let his mouth go slack and opened his eyes wide.
“Two boats,” Athena told the najashi. “Boy’s animals, Tena’s animals, Boy’s boats.”
“Why are you searching my desk?” Abreha asked quietly.
“Athena knew the maps were here,” Telemakos said. “She wanted to see the animal pictures.”
Abreha stood frowning, gazing down at the children. Telemakos could hear Tharan and Gedar talking in the next room, and for a heartbeat he thought Abreha was going to overlook the intrusion. Then Telemakos glanced down at the folded pages he still held.
They were letters, addressed to him. Most of them bore Goewin’s dragon seal. One bore his father’s small, fine, careful script. Telemakos stared at the najashi.
“Put everything away,” Abreha said.
Telemakos brandished the sheaf of stolen letters like a firebrand.
“These are mine!”
“Put them away,” said Abreha patiently.
Now Tharan came up behind the najashi and said, “You would be wise to search him.”
“I don’t take other people’s things,” Telemakos said hotly.
His anger startled Athena.
“Boy?” she asked uncertainly, looking for quick reassurance.
Telemakos put down the letters and ran his fingers lightly over her hair. Abreha Anbessa said levelly to his lieutenant, “Take the baby up to Muna. I’ll question the boy myself.”
Athena was not prepared to accept this reasonably. She was tired, she was hungry, she had not seen Telemakos all day, and she did not like Tharan. She lowered her coppery eyebrows in a foreboding grimace.
“Put him away,” she said with determination as Tharan stepped forward.
Still cradling her protectively, Telemakos whispered, “Little owlet, Tharan is going to take you for your supper—”
She let out a wail and pulled on Telemakos’s hair with both hands, clinging to him with all her strength.
“Come on, Tena—”
Gedar and an attendant carrying a wine jar stood in the doorway, curious.
The najashi stepped behind Telemakos and took hold of him by his right wrist and the stump of his left shoulder, gently easing his arm away from Athena. Telemakos stiffened. This was somehow invasive, too intimate; the near destruction of his body was a private thing. Athena began to scream blue murder as Tharan unbuckled the straps of her harness, while Abreha held Telemakos still with his hand on the smooth ball of Telemakos’s shoulder, controlling and lightly threatening. Telemakos did not dare struggle against his guardian. Only when Tharan pulled Athena away did Telemakos cry out softly, “Let me go! Let me take her up, or stop her screaming, so she’ll go with you quietly, only—”
The najashi made no answer. He steered Telemakos around so that he was not able to see Tharan leave with the baby. Telemakos could hear the vizier begin to offer some explanation to Gedar before Tharan closed the door upon them.
Abreha pushed Telemakos down to sit on the floor and settled himself cross-legged before him. Then with one hand the najashi took firm hold of Telemakos again, pressing his fingertips against the inside of Telemakos’s wrist; his other hand he slipped inside Telemakos’s shirt, so that his palm lay against Telemakos’s scarred chest, just over his heart.
“Now tell me, you young fox,” Abreha said, “tell me truthfully, the answer to a question that has been troubling me for a season and more. What made your grandfather so suddenly decide to send you here? Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos’s heart lurched. He could feel the pulse in his wrist racing beneath Abreha’s fingertips.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos thought, He will know if I lie to him. He will know.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
“A slew of ugly threats were aimed at our house, just after the quarantine was lifted,” Telemakos said. “My parents, my mother especially, were afraid to keep us there.”
“What kind of threats?”
“They did not tell me.” Telemakos chose his words with care. “They didn’t want to frighten me.”
Abreha sighed.
“Do you understand why I am angry, when it looks as though you are sorting through my private papers?”
“Those are mine,” Telemakos retorted. “Why are you keeping them from me?”
“I live with the same fear that made your grandfather send you away. A great struggle for power and wealth goes on at all times over your head, and you are safer knowing nothing about it.”
Telemakos made no answer, feeling his heartbeat beneath Abreha’s hand and fingers. What in the world have they been trying to tell me in all those letters? What does Abreha know that I don’t?
“Now tell me another thing,” Abreha said. “What intrigue do you suspect concerning the Hanish Islands?”
Telemakos’s heart was in his throat again, choking him.
“I know nothing of such an intrigue.”
“Strictly speaking, that may be true,” said Abreha. “But just now I heard you shrewdly hazarding that there is one, and I find it disturbing that so innocent a guest should leap to such conclusions.”
Telemakos tried to keep his voice level.
“I’ve been put to work making copies of your maps. No one has told me anything about why they are so important, or so secret. What would anyone think, seeing these diagrams, but that you want the Hanish Islands under your control?”
“Will you keep your suspicions to yourself, or sow them abroad? Will you send a copy of your own map back to your map-loving aunt, the British ambassador, a riddle for the Sphinx to solve?”
“My aunt?” Telemakos whispered. “What is it to do with her?”
He was sure the unsteady beat of his own blood would betray her. Abreha could tell what Telemakos knew or did not know, or at the least cared about, by touching him lightly with his fingertips. Telemakos held silent, not trusting himself to speak.
But the najashi brushed the question by. He said irrelevantly, “That lion has left his scent on you.” Abreha withdrew the hand that had been held over Telemakos’s heart to pluck straw from his hair, and tapped his cheek with it. “You might have asked someone to comb this out before you came down. You must have been back in Ghumdan at least an hour before the rest of us.”
“I stayed with Menelik until—”
Telemakos stopped himself short, staring mesmerized at Abreha’s fingers around his wrist.
“Until?” the najashi prompted in a voice like steel needles.
Telemakos tried to pull away from him then, in foolhardy, unguarded desperation.
“Until I came into the kennels?” Abreha guessed.
Oh, Telemakos lashed himself in fear and fury, what is the matter with me? I did not spill my secrets to Anako like this, when he was making Hara pull my fingernails out!
“What did you hear?”
Telemakos shuddered.
“Tell me what you heard.”
Telemakos fell back on his boldest and most desperate ruse, the headlong assault. He whispered, “You spoke to Gedar. You are hunting an informer, someone who betrayed you to Gebre Meskal during the plague quarantine, which you had found a way around so that your trade with Aksum might continue without the emperor’s sanction. Gedar discovered my grandfather to be the emperor’s agent, and so sent threats to our house, not expecting those threats to drive me and my sister here.” Telemakos paused. His words sounded somehow sharp and calculating in his own ears, and he added, trying to simulate fearful innocence, “Will you use us as hostages, then, against my grandfather?”
