Coalition of Lions (7 page)

Wazeb was always there as well, listening without watching us, his head tilted to one side as Halen whispered brief translations at his ear. Once, when Constantine and I had become embroiled in yet another bitter argument, Constantine had turned to Wazeb and said apologetically, “We dishonor you, debating so in your company.”

“Not at all,” Wazeb had answered lightly. “It is very interesting.”

It made my neck go tense, thinking about it.

“Constantine has wealth my father did not have,” I said to Priamos. “I have allegiances his father does not have. And I know where my father’s soldiers are stationed, and their numbers and strengths, and which parts of Mercia had an abundant harvest last year and so on—but I dislike Constantine so much I don’t want to tell him anything. We scarcely greet each other before we are battling, and we get nowhere, and each day we begin again at the beginning. I have said I will not marry him unless he lets me choose an heir.”

“Ah, queen of kings indeed!” Priamos laughed. “A princess at liberty to choose her father’s heir! How you have turned your weakness to your advantage. Or is it more like a hostage negotiation?”

“That,” I said, and reached to take the book Telemakos held, “that is a thing we do not talk about.” I closed the book and put it aside. Telemakos picked it up again. “I grow weary of my fruitless interviews with Constantine. We will have nothing to say to each other long before winter is over.”

“You must think of some occupation,” said Priamos. “I am teaching the tame lion to read the testaments in Greek.”

“Teaching the tame lion to read Greek? What are you talking about?”

“It is my mother’s name for Wazeb,” Priamos said. “It is a greater compliment than you might think. A tame lion is less predictable than a chained one. Isn’t that right, young lion tamer?”

Telemakos did not answer. He was frowning studiously over the volume I had tried to take from him. He cried, “Oh, look at this!” and began to unfold a page. Spread out, it entirely covered his lap. “Oh, what is this a map of? I can’t read Greek either—”

I bent over his shoulder. It was a map of the world.

“Here’s Aksum—” I pointed “—where we are now. And here is Britain, where I come from. I can show you the way we traveled, look, starting up here, following the coast past Britanny and Iberia—”

We were both suddenly absorbed. Telemakos held the map open, his touch light and careful. He watched my finger tracing its path across the papyrus and nodded as I listed the Mediterranean ports where we had stopped.

Priamos watched us. When I looked up at him again he said, “I did not know
you
read Greek.”

“I don’t. My mother was a mapmaker. She taught me to draw the projections in Ptolemy’s
Geography.
I can’t read the names, but I know the map very well. What is this book?”

“It’s a
Red Sea Itinerary.
It’s a shipping guide. I wish we’d had this on our voyage; it might have stopped you always questioning our route.”

“I only questioned when you suddenly changed our route, before I knew we were followed. Look, Telemakos, here is Gabaza, the customs point for ships arriving at Adulis. I thought I would not be able to breathe, it was so hot when we landed there. It was so strange to me. But there was another white passenger on our ship, a merchant sailor who could not speak, and while I was waiting to disembark I watched him making his way through the crowd on the quay. He gave me courage. I’d never met him face-to-face; I only ever saw his back. But he gave me courage. He walked haltingly, like the rest of us, unused to land beneath his legs, but he moved with such confidence and purpose. I thought that if a man who could not speak was able to face strangers so fearlessly, then so should I be able to. And see, when I arrived, there were no strangers after all. There was you.”

“Show me how you came here from Adulis,” Telemakos demanded.

“Goodness, haven’t you had enough of maps yet?”

“I love maps,” Telemakos answered promptly.

Priamos laughed. “Well, see, both of you. I bought this edition because of the maps.”

He lifted the book from Telemakos’s lap and folded the wide sheet back in place. “Here is the road from Adulis to Aksum,” Priamos said, turning pages over. “And look, let me show you my favorite. Here is the road to Debra Damo, the cliff top hermitage where I and my brothers were sequestered.”

The picture was so stylized that you could scarcely call it a map: it showed an entire landscape. The road was drawn as a thin line with a cross marked at either end, and hatchings and bends here and there to mark turnings along the way. Around the road were miniature sketches of trees and animals and villages, all leading to a wide plateau with a geometric Aksumite church perched on its flat height. Below the church there lurked a serpent the size of an elephant, stretching its fearsome coils up the cliff side.

“What on earth is that?” I asked. “Have they got a dragon to guard you there?”

“The saint who founded the monastery was lifted to the top of the amba plateau by a flying serpent,” Priamos said. “Or so the stories say. In its place now they have a leather rope. There is no other way in or out.”

“You’d be very safe,” said Telemakos.

“Some people go there for sanctuary,” Priamos said. “But my brother Mikael has spent his life imprisoned there, and that is not the same thing at all.”

Priamos closed the book and reached out to lay it atop one of the stacks I had made. Beneath his shamma his arms were bare, and I noticed again the small, stick scars on his wrists. They were so faded you could only see them when they caught the light.

“Goewin wants to meet your mother,” Telemakos said. “Will you take us to her, Ras Priamos?”

“That I will do with pleasure, Telemakos Meder. I may not stay, though.”

Candake the queen of queens, negeshta nagashtat, was enormous. I have since heard many people call her beautiful, as Telemakos did, and so she is; but still Caleb’s elder sister was bigger than any human being I have ever seen. She must have weighed as much as a small buffalo. She was not able to move as quickly as a buffalo, though, and was surrounded by a swarm of attendants who helped her to sit and to stand, and who seemed to feed her constantly. Her hair had gone salt white, and there were dozens of fine gold chains woven into her tight plaits. She was wonderful, and terrifying; in her own way, eerily, much like my aunt Morgause.

“Ah, you bring her to me at last, Priamos! How I have longed to see this girl! The queen of queens beholds the—what did you call her in the tribunal?”

“Queen of kings,” Telemakos supplied.

I wondered, Where did you pick up that?

“The queen of kings.” Candake creased and cackled with uncontrollable laughter, and leaned forward to grab Telemakos’s hands and swing them back and forth as though she were dancing with him. “Queen of kings! Like Cleopatra!” I thought she was going to choke herself laughing. “Or Makeda, the queen of Sheba, the mother of us all! Ah, Priamos, no other of my children could have been destined to speak as the mouth of the king; you have the flyaway tongue of a catbird.

“Girl, do you know what he said when he came before my brother Caleb for the first time, what he called the negus? ‘Solomon,’ he said. ‘Solomon walks among us in your wisdom.’ And Caleb said it was bad enough he had a base traitor in one nephew, without another being a groveling sycophant.”

“My lady mother, I am supposed to go and repeat to my old tutor what little I have learned of the British tongue,” Priamos interrupted quickly. “I will leave you alone with the princess.”

Candake paused for breath, chuckling and wheezing. “Priamos was sick, sick with nerves. After the presentation to Caleb they took the children out to see the animals, and he vomited into the lion pit.”

One of Priamos’s guards was twitching in his attempt to keep a straight face. “Go, go!” Priamos said to them, turning quickly. “Tedla, Ebana, I swear I’ll have you whipped for insolence. Go! I am late.” He drove the guards before him with his arms spread wide, abandoning me to his mother.

“Coward!” I called after him, laughing.

“No coward,” his mother grunted darkly. “He will find little time for idle sport this winter. The bala heg are going to keep him busy.”

Telemakos settled himself comfortably at the grand woman’s feet. He leaned low to the floor and chirruped softly. Three slender cats the color of sand, with faint stripes across their noses and tails, came slinking out from beneath baskets and behind curtains and swarmed over his lap. One of them perched on his shoulder, rubbing its head against his face and purring so violently you could have heard it from across the room.

“You may trust my handmaids, little Sheba,” Candake told me kindly. “Say what you like; who shall repeat it outside this court shall have her tongue cut out.”

She patted Telemakos on top of his head with one of her fat, painted hands. “Isn’t that right, my fox kit?”

He tossed his head. “You don’t scare me,” he said loftily. “And anyway—I’m no telltale.”

They had to say everything two or three times over before I could fully understand it, but I think that is how it went. Candake made me sit at her feet opposite Telemakos. Then, tilting my chin toward her with one thick, emerald-laden finger, the queen of queens demanded: “Tell me, Princess of Britain, have you met my sweet nephew, the good and holy Wazeb, heir to the king of kings? A king-priest shall we have in him, not a bad thing, though his father thinks him a very silly boy. And what think you of our salt-faced regent? Let me touch your hands while we speak, your smooth pale hands. Constantine will not let me near him.”

I thought she had some important things to tell me, implied in her pregnant questions. I let her stroke my hands, fascinated by her.

“Can you explain—” I ventured. “Can you tell me how Constantine came to power here?”

“Through my brother having the temperament of a hyena.” Candake snickered. One of the maids began to feed her pieces of fruit cut into stars and crescents and diamonds. “Why should Caleb work when another can do it for him? Hyena! Caleb sent one after another of my sons into battle, so to avoid losing any more of his own. The day my husband Anbessa died, even before he was lying in his grave, Caleb sent the order that my sons should be released from their sequestering and brought to him to train as his warriors. My brother has emptied his treasury on war and this palace. He looks at his heir and sees that Wazeb chants and dreams of God. Caleb mourns his lost Aryat, and thinks his ravaged kingdom will fall to a son without ambition or ability.

“So Caleb designs to retire to the dragon’s hermitage and let another patch up his empire for him, while Wazeb waits his chance at power. But Wazeb will not grasp and grab at authority. Ha! You watch him. The tame lion. And they think all the lions have gone from the emperor’s palace!” She gave another burst of elephantine laughter.

“So Caleb looks about him for a regent, saying, Which of these attendant insects will suck up the most nourishment for Aksum, before he begins to whine so irritatingly that Wazeb is forced to snatch up the imperial fly whisk? Caleb reviews them all and fixes on the mosquito Constantine. No one else is so strict, so plodding and pedantic. And no one is so dispensable. So they go up to Mai Shum with the bishop, the abuna, and a cloud of priests, and in the reservoir they baptize Constantine again with our own baptism, and so you see him now, the viceroy Ella Amida.”

Candake stopped speaking at last, wheezing.

“So if Constantine fails, the blame is Constantine’s,” I said. “And if he succeeds, the kingdom is Wazeb’s. Whatever happens, no reproof will come to Caleb. It is not so unaccountable as it looks.”

“A princess and a politician!” Candake chuckled. “Bring coffee. Feed some of those to the princess,” she ordered suddenly; and to my consternation, the maid began to put the fruit stars into my mouth.

“How long will Wazeb endure it?” I asked, when I could. “Does he seem likely to snatch up the fly stick?”

“Fly stick!” Candake creased herself laughing again. “Why should he put down his prayer stick? It is good enough for swatting flies, and his British viceroy is bringing order and wealth to the mess his father left behind him. The tame lion will wait and watch.”

Then she screamed for the coffee to be brought.

“Where’s that boy gone?” Candake demanded suddenly. “He likes coffee.”

The cats had slipped silently away, and Telemakos had disappeared after them. I have no idea when it happened. Only the distance of Candake’s enormous knees had separated him from me, but I had never even seen him move. Candake waved a hand dismissively as the coffee things were laid before her.

“He does that all the time, artful young fox. Drives his poor grandfather to the edge of madness. How the child makes me laugh!” Which she did, violently, before lighting her burner. “His mother won’t allow him coffee anyway. Now, my little queen of Sheba, set aside the mosquito Constantine while we drink together.”

“Look what we found in the tax office.”

I was on my way to my appointed meeting with Constantine, but he found me first, in the breezeway that connected Candake’s private wing with the main body of the palace. Constantine came forward with Telemakos at his side, one hand resting on the back of the child’s head. Behind them stood the impassive ceremonial spear bearers. Telemakos was still and serious, more than usually contained. He did not show it in any obvious way, but I was seeing something I had not seen in him before: he was afraid.

“Have the decency to use full grown spies in future,” Constantine told me in a voice of frost.

“I have not yet stooped to spying on you,” I answered in an equal tone.

Telemakos said heatedly, “I would not get caught if she did.” He tilted his head back, suddenly, and winced.

Constantine had hold of his thick hair.

“Queen’s pawn should be played more cautiously than this,” Constantine said, and gave the child’s head such a yank that Telemakos screwed his eyes shut and bared his missing teeth, though he did not make a sound.

“Here,” Constantine said offhandedly, letting go and pushing the child forward with a hard smack to the back of his skull. “See him home. I may still have time for you when you get back.”