A Coalition of Lions (Page 10)
“Can I go through the markets? And the Necropolis, where the monuments are? Can I go anywhere I like, as long as I stay out of the New Palace?”
Something occurred to me: he had said he must beg Kidane to take him to the New Palace.
“Are you usually allowed to go anywhere you like?”
“Not by myself,” Telemakos said.
Suddenly I wanted him out of this. He was too obliviously innocent. If he did not serve me willingly, I would not coerce him, and he was not ready to make such choices himself.
“You can go anywhere you like,” I said, “as long as someone can see you.”
Telemakos answered mournfully, “That’s the part I don’t like. Having to stay where someone can see me. I will soon forget that part.”
“Think about Nafas’s spear,” I told him, “and you’ll not forget.”
We went through the gate together. “Let’s tell your mother,” I added.
CHAPTER VI
The Long Rains
“I WARNED YOU I should be a disagreeable guest,” I uttered in a low voice. Telemakos was in bed, and Turunesh sat spinning in her private sitting room by the brilliant light of a glass oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. My own hands were idle. “I should not have allowed my quarrel with Constantine to come to this.”
“Don’t falter now,” Turunesh said. “Hold Constantine in check. I’ll take Telemakos out of it.” She seemed calm as ever; her busy hands never stopped moving. “The roads are all impassable in winter, but in the new year I’ll bring Telemakos to my father’s country estate in Adwa.”
The Aksumite new year falls in British September. It was July now; their spring was still at least six weeks away. It seemed remote and distant.
“You are too forgiving,” I said, angry at myself.
“They all say that. I make a pet of my son. But he is all I will ever have of his father, and his sweet affection melts my heart.”
“It is battering away at mine, as well. I do not deserve such compassion. I am remorseless as my aunt.”
“You are both kings’ daughters,” Turunesh agreed mildly, as though that excused even the worst excesses of libertine behavior; or indeed, as though it were reason to expect such excesses. She laid her spindle in her lap. “Princess, what other weapon do you have? I cannot condemn you. I would do the same for my kingdom, if I had to.”
It rained and rained. Even the doves were bad-tempered. It was worse than Britain; the rain came down torrentially, day after day. I slopped back and forth in it almost daily between Kidane’s house and the New Palace, bedraggled men begging at my heels. My only consolation for making this trek was that every now and then I found Priamos left momentarily idle and able to sit and talk with me. I dragged him into the Golden Court to get him out of his room.
We sat on the marble rim of the big fountain, as we had on the morning of my arrival in the city. One of the monkeys crept up to us and climbed into Priamos’s lap. Priamos fondled the elegant black-and-white creature beneath its chin, then suddenly drew taut the monkey’s gold chain with one hand. Priamos said abruptly, “I hate this.”
He shook the links, which rang musically. “I cannot see any reason to keep them if they must be chained. They are supposed to be climbers and leapers.”
“You said that Caleb’s lions were chained.”
“It made me sick to look at them.” Priamos shook the monkey’s lead again, and began to pick idly at the rivet that fastened it into the marble wall. “Mikael was always kept in chains,” he said. “My eldest brother. When I was young, sequestered with Hector and Ityopis and Yared, we thought Mikael a terrible monster. He would shake his chains at us when we came near, just as these monkeys do. He never spoke except to recite scripture or scream for a spear. His ‘serpent-slaying spear,’ he called it. He is named for the saint who founded Debra Damo, and for the angel Michael.”
The marble around the rivet was chipped, and Priamos worried it as he spoke. “Hector once schemed that he should furnish Mikael with a spear, just to see what he would do with it.”
“What did he do with it?” I asked, fascinated.
“Nothing. Which was as well, because Hector was caught and trapped in an empty reservoir with Mikael and his serpent’ slaying spear for half a week.”
Priamos jerked at the monkey’s chain. “I do not think often about Mikael. But I hate to see wild creatures bound. I cannot stomach it.”
I remembered the cowed boy led on board the yacht in Septem, and Priamos’s angry scowl, and the light, sympathetic brush of his gentle hand against mine.
Again he jerked at the golden links, and the fastening came away from the wall, bringing a spall of marble with it.
I laughed. “There, you have freed him.” The elegant monkey still curled against Priamos’s other arm, unaware it had been released.
Priamos set it down on the pool’s rim aside of him, and laughed also. “I wonder if the rest will come away so easily,” he said, and reached over me to pull at the chain on the other side of the bench. It did not.
One of his guards said politely, “Prince, best leave it—”
Priamos stood up, ignoring him. He wrapped the gold links around his hand and gave a ferocious heave, throwing all his weight against the chain. A chunk of marble the size of his fist came out of the fountain wall.
“Hai!”
He snatched at another chain. One guard tried to trip him with the shaft of a spear, and the other lunged for him. He was quicker than either of them. He jumped over the rim, splashed noisily across the fountain, and attacked one of the chains on the opposite side of the stone pool. The guards leaped after him, at once crying for assistance and yelling at him to stop. The monkeys already freed scampered chattering up the columns toward the coffered ceiling; those yet chained began roaring in fear or excitement.
“Priamos, be not a fool!”
Priamos was fast. There were half a dozen monkeys loose now, and there were no less than six men trying to pull him down, but Priamos seemed always to be a hairsbreadth ahead of them. Wazeb came wafting into the court as through drawn by the commotion. I could not see over all their heads, and stood on the edge of the fountain.
“Priamos, stop!” I cried in dismay, slipping unhelpfully into Latin. “Oh, God, your hands!” The chains were tearing them to shreds.
Ityopis caught him by one arm and struggled with him, crying out desperately, “Sir, this is madness, madness! You have waited so patiently—”
“I cannot sit here and look at them any longer,” Priamos gasped, gentle Priamos, and wrenched two more monkeys free before his guards and three soldiers and a butler dragged him to the ground.
Seconds later Constantine dragged him up again by a length of his shamma, half choking him. “My God, the waste! The expense!” He struck Priamos viciously across the face. “Do you have any idea what it costs to keep this palace as Caleb ordered it? Or how much was thrown away on that twenty-year debacle in Himyar—”
“Seventeen,” Priamos interrupted hotly. “Seventeen years it went on, not twenty.”
Constantine hit him again.
“Stop this!” I bellowed. “You idiots both—”
“What do you know of Himyar?” Priamos blazed at Caleb’s viceroy, reckless with rebellion and outrage. “What do you know of Abreha? Have you ever been there? Have you ever seen him?”
“I know Himyar,” Constantine said. “I was in Sana last year as Caleb’s envoy, do you not remember? Abreha was so bold as to ask me to stay as his own ambassador! I know the face of treachery when I see it!”
“Well, I am not Abreha!” Priamos cried out, so impassioned he was near to weeping.
“Yet you insist on undermining my authority! You conspire with the princess who is to be my bride, you run riot in my court, and then you dare argue with me! I do not like these damned colobus any more than you do—”
“So get rid of them!”
Constantine struck him a third time across the face, more coldly, as though in an effort to bring him to his senses. Priamos staggered, and was held up by his guards.
“I am going to see you bound in this place as long as it takes to repair the walls,” Constantine said, his voice hard and controlled. “I do not care how noble a prince you are; I will not let you test my stewardship with such brass insolence. Let everyone see what you have done.”
“My lord Ella Amida,” begged Ityopis, “in God’s name use reason in your punishment of him.”
And the Golden Court was a ruin. Water leaked from a crack in the fountain wall where the marble had been torn out, monkeys roared and barked in the ceiling, potted trees lay uprooted and overturned, marble fragments strewed the floor.
“At least give him a choice,” said Wazeb in his light, casual way.
Constantine pressed his lips together tightly; his nostrils flared. “He shall be chained here so long as it takes to mend the walls. Three days, perhaps. I do not have it in me to be gentler than this.”
Priamos winced and shrank as though he had been struck again. “Three—” He swallowed, and bit at his lower lip. “Three—” Then he seemed to retch, as though the very words he tried to speak were so loathsome that he could not hold them in his mouth. “Three years or three minutes, it is all the same to me. I would sooner be flayed.”
Constantine paused for a long moment, and then said levelly, “Would you?”
“Yes.” Priamos answered without hesitation.
“A choice,” repeated Wazeb.
Constantine sighed and glanced at Ityopis. “Just so. Ras Priamos, if you will not be bound here, then you will take a score’s lash stripes on each palm. Choose.”
“My God, Constantine,” I cried out. “Only look at his hands!”
Priamos looked down at them himself, as if noticing for the first time the damage he had done them. He could not raise them, because the guards had hold of his arms.
“Go send for a whip,” he said stubbornly.
Constantine sighed again, and nodded to the butler, who left the room. I climbed down from the pool’s edge, sick at heart.
Ityopis begged fervently, “Grant the small courtesy, then, that if he takes this beating, let that be the end of it. Let this not be spoken of over and over and held as an example of his insurrection. Let it pass as an act of thoughtless passion, finished on both sides. We are all weary of the winter rains.” He stopped to draw breath. “Let me see to the repairs.”
“All right,” said Constantine, then snorted. “The brothers Anbessa, a coalition of lions, indeed! You are a nest of scorpions.”
The butler returned. He gave the whip to Constantine and asked to be dismissed.
“All right. Send for the animals keeper; we need these monkeys caught.”
“Ah, let me come with you,” said Wazeb. “I like the animals keeper.” They left together. I stared after the boy, hating him.