The Empty Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

not Gedar’s voice. It was Medraut’s voice, low and dark and full of music. Telemakos knew he had mistaken both men. It was his father condemning him so poisonously, and the other man was Medraut’s dead brother, Lleu, the prince of Britain, dark-haired and white-faced and imperious. They were allied against him. Telemakos tried to pull free of the cold hand that gripped his wrist; his dead arm came away in his father’s hand. Telemakos fled back the way he had come, stumbling, all out of balance over the old stones of the wall he could not see in the mist around his feet.

III
ADVICE TO THE NAJASHI
    T HOUGH HALF HIS LETTERS home were truly innocent of any intrigue, Telemakos felt he had to construct pitfalls for himself, to keep him on his guard, in case he should alert Abreha to his change of mood when he was not endangering himself. He took to baiting the najashi.
There are many empty rooms in the Ghumdan palaces .
    The najashi likes to play mother to the small orphans .
    His spearmen are not so well trained as Gebre Meskal’s .
    Telemakos included this last comment in a letter to his grandfather. He meant nothing more artful by it than to nettle Abreha with its scornful tone. When he read it aloud, the najashi stopped Telemakos short and ordered, “Repeat that.”
    Telemakos did, and felt himself go cold as he realized how much it sounded like a general’s report.
    “And again,” Abreha ordered quietly.
    Halfway through his third reading of it, Telemakos faltered, the flattened palm frond trembling so in his grip that he could not make out the writing on it. He went down on his knees with a jangle of silver and bowed his head.
    Abreha’s signet ring brushed cool and rough against the base of Telemakos’s skull as the najashi laid his hand over the back of his neck.
    “Hush, child.” Abreha spoke soothingly. “To send plainly stated military information to the imperial parliament of Aksum would be a fool’s mistake, and you are no fool. Destroy this letter, and write another.”
    Telemakos rewrote it sitting at Abreha’s own desk, beneath the najashi’s watchful, frowning glare, and gave away no hint of the iron menace that shadowed him except in that his shaking pen produced writing that was more unreadable than usual.
    He was careful not to mention Abreha’s soldiers again. He had still the threatened Hanish Islands to tell of, and that was a deal more dangerous to mention than the palace guard. He began to look forward to the time when Aksum’s highland roads would be closed by the Long Rains, and he would have a reasonable excuse not to write home. He was rarely allowed a moment’s idleness anyway, and the scheming was beginning to exhaust him.
    Dawit, sadistically, liked best to set his apprentice several tasks at once. Telemakos would have to polish the enormous teak-and-crystal compass from Cathay, translate a Greek geography aloud into South Arabian, and calculate latitudes on an abacus all at the same time. He was awkward and self-conscious, juggling scrolls and pens and tools with his single hand. The pens had been Athena’s province; she had sorted and cleaned them and passed them out. Telemakos missed her there to pick up the things he dropped and to hold his pages flat.
    While Telemakos drew, the Star Master plied him with endless mental arithmetical calculations or drilled him in lists of stars or rivers or the principal cities of Persia.
    “Name the tribal kingdoms of Himyar and southern Arabia.”
    “Kinda and Qataban, Hadramawt, Awsan—” Telemakos hesitated. Through the pulley hole came a noise of torrential weeping, but for once it was not Athena. This was one of the bigger girls. Inas?
    “Ma’in.” Telemakos hesitated again. He bent over the map he was drawing, trying to recite the required list of kingdoms mechanically but concentrating on the voice below. It was not Inas of Ma’in. It was Malika, the lovely, preening girl who called herself queen of Sheba. Her wordless