Sunbird by Elizabeth Wein

Author:Elizabeth Wein [Wein, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6007-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-11-21T22:05:00+00:00

X

THE LAZARUS

—tight in his claws a struggling dove, and he ripped its feathers out and they drifted down to earth …

15:589–91

HIS HAIR WAS GROWING back. Telemakos could tell, because people suddenly began to touch his head, as if for luck, like the street children of Aksum. It came out of nowhere: when he was waiting for his shoulders to be hung about with water skins, when he was eating, sometimes when he was allowed a few moments to sit resting with his head against his knees between trips out to the salt. Light fingers brushed against his scalp and no one ever said anything. Eventually he could feel the slight give of the new hair as the surreptitious fingers swept over it.

There was not a thing Telemakos could do about his hair, except to hope that it would not be recognized or held against him.

Caravan upon caravan of traders arrived and left without Telemakos’s being parceled off to them, and he was in an agony of confusion as to what this could mean. Had they not been willing to pay whatever exorbitant price Hara asked for him, or had he not been offered to them? None of the bands had included the man Telemakos was waiting for, so he tried to be thankful that he had not been shipped off already. He suspected and hoped, and feared so cravenly he grew ashamed of himself, that Hara was waiting for the Lazarus even as Telemakos was, and meant to offer Telemakos to him and none other.

His tracker’s intuition was dead on target. It was in fact more than two months since Telemakos had left Adulis, and a little less than two months since he had first come to the mines in Afar. Telemakos was one day stripped of his baggage and led to a place he had not been before, but which he knew existed: the enclosure where the foremen and warden camped. Telemakos was taken inside one of the shelters; he could tell he was inside by the shade, though it was not much cooler than without. It was anyway singularly different from the punishing legwork he had grown used to, and it set his nerves on edge.

“What is that?” said an oily, disdainful voice in accented Greek. “What is it?’

The man stank with a sour animal reek. Telemakos could not identify it, his sense of smell dulled by salt and thirst. It made him think of baboon.

The warden’s voice answered, “I have an idea he is the one we call the Harrier.”

I am lost, thought Telemakos in horror, and never moved.

“You are suspicious of everything,” said the baboon.

“I am the Scorpion. That is my job.”

“Scorpion!” the other repeated with deep scorn. “That is what you call yourself, at any rate. What makes you think this small, frightened thing is the emperor’s most elusive informer?”

“Two reasons. One is that my own agents tell me the Harrier is no longer operating in Adulis; and the other is that in every caravan

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