The Empty Kingdom by Elizabeth Wein

Author:Elizabeth Wein [Wein, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-11-21T22:34:00+00:00

IX

MARIB

HE WAS IN A foul mood in the weeks following his father’s visit: one day, that one day being all they had had. It had not even been a day, really, just those few hours in the najashi’s reception room, with Medraut held in chains the whole of their time together.

So the najashi kept his promise and took Telemakos to see the dam at Marib. The journey, Telemakos knew, was meant to console and distract him, and he resisted consolation. But it worked anyway. Telemakos liked traveling. He liked being part of a royal retinue; it was on one of Gebre Meskal’s hunting parties that Telemakos had first met Abreha, when the najashi had come to Aksum to witness Gebre Meskal’s initiation as emperor. The journey Abreha made to Marib now was a routine check on the dam and the dedication of a monument commemorating its rebuilding. But the najashi traveled with all the trappings of an imperial progress, including his wife and his gazelle hounds and Malika the child queen of Sheba, who was heir to the Marib principality. When the silk tents were raised in Marib’s green fields, it felt like a party.

Athena did not like Marib. The empty windows of the ruined palace there scared her, as did the dark, abandoned pre-Christian temple that was half buried beneath drifting sand. All around the great dam, and the irrigated land that it watered, orange groves stretched so far out on the plains toward the desert that you could not see their borders. But you could not get rid of the sand that blew in from the desert reaches of the Empty Quarter. When the wind blew, Athena rode at Telemakos’s side with her face hidden in his shoulder, or with a length of his shamma pulled over her head, to keep the sand out of her eyes. She spat with vicious disdain when it got in her mouth; you had to filter water before you could drink it. City children were paid to sweep the sand away from the buttresses around the great dam’s sluices.

But Telemakos liked Marib. In part he was honestly impressed at the work Abreha had done here, restoring a piece of engineering a thousand years old, with such painstaking attention that a land of semi-desert was transformed into a green valley that could produce grain throughout the year. And in part Telemakos was simply glad to be out of San’a, and the endless stairways of the Ghumdan palaces.

Telemakos and Athena, and the young salukis Argos and Selene, slept outside the tents on still nights. The tail end of winter was passing; the dry, sandy soil still kept the day’s heat and was warm to the touch throughout the evening. Weaverbirds nested where the grass grew long and insects sang. The wind died after sundown, and you could breathe again without getting sand up your nose. Lines of ancient willow trees radiated outward from the dam, showing where the oldest of the water courses had run, buried now but still nourishing the trees.

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