The Child

"A trap is never baited with what the victim fears. It is baited with what he has been starving for."

He did sleep, in the end. She sat beside the low camp bed until the lamp guttered, with her cloak drawn over her knees and her eyes on the slow rise and fall of his chest, and she thought that she had never in her life seen anything so unguarded as the face of a man who has wept himself empty and does not yet know that he will wake to something worse. He slept as the very tired sleep, flat on his back, one arm flung out across the blanket and the dark half-disc still tangled in his fingers. Once, towards the small hours, he muttered a word in the Kavanu tongue, and she bent close and heard it, and sat back with her hand pressed hard against her mouth. It was her name. It was said the way a man says the name of a place he has been trying to remember how to reach.

She did not sleep. She sat with the thing she had come to do, and turned it over, and found that it had grown no lighter.

…

Morning came up grey and cold over the oasis, with a thin mist lying on the water and the palms standing in it up to their knees like women bathing. Zuberi's men had brought bread and dates and a pot of bitter black tea, and Jabari ate in silence, slowly, as a man eats who is learning again how to taste. He had washed his face. He had combed his beard. There was a different set to his shoulders this morning, a loosening, as though some great hook that had been fixed in the flesh of his back for twenty years had been drawn out in the night, and the wound had not yet begun to close. He watched her over the rim of his cup. Twice she saw him begin to speak and stop. At last he set the cup down on the table with a small hard click, and said it.

"Tell me where he is."

She had known this was coming since the first bright edge of the dawn crept under the tent flap. She had planned this moment through nine days at sea, in every possible form: the cry, the silence, the cold polite refusal. She had planned a tremor in the voice at exactly the right place. And now that it was here, with the clean morning light falling across his tired black eyes, she found that all her preparations had gone out of her head like water from a cracked jar, and that what she felt was not triumph, or calculation, or even fear, but a plain, shaming, enormous reluctance.

Say it, said the cold small voice. You have come all this way. Say it. It is the only door.

"He is closer than you think," said Claudia.

Jabari's hands went still.

"I did not lie to you about the basket. I sent him south, to a man who trained gladiators at Capua, and he grew up in the barracks among soldiers, and he learned everything that a soldier can learn. He learned to ride, and to read a line of battle, and to look at the ground and know where the water lies. He was cleverer than all of them. It frightened the old men." Her voice wavered and she steadied it. "He was brought back to Rome when he was eighteen, and adopted into my family by the will of my father's brother. He took a Roman name. He took a Roman wife, and a Roman command, and in the last two years he has won more battles than any man since Scipio."

She stopped.

She watched the understanding arrive. It came slowly, in stages, like the light on the water: first the blank incomprehension, then the faint ripple of something that could not be, then a stillness so complete that the tea in the cup beside his hand stopped trembling. She saw his lips part. She saw his throat move. She saw him look, with an expression she would remember until she died, at the thin square of grey sky visible through the tent flap, where, across three miles of sand and scrub, beyond the dunes and the dust, the Roman standards stood against the morning.

"The Dux," Jabari said.

"Yes."

"The young one. The one who will not be drawn." His voice was a thread. "The one who fights as though—"

"As though you had taught him." She nodded, and the tears came up in her eyes, real tears, the worst kind, the kind she could not have counted on. "You did. You taught him nothing, and you taught him everything. He has your hands. He has your patience. When he was a child he played at war with pebbles in the dust, and he drew the horns and the crescent, and the old trainer beat him for it. He has never known why he knew. He has never known whose blood it was."

…

Jabari stood up.

He did it so quietly that the bench did not scrape. He rose to his full height under the sloping roof of the tent, with one hand resting on the table and his head bent beneath the ridgepole, and stood looking at nothing. She thought for a moment that he was going to strike her. She thought, with a curious distant calm, that she would not blame him. But he only turned, slowly, and walked to the end of the tent, and put his hand flat against the wool of the wall, as a man puts a hand to a wall in the dark to find his way.

"Nine battles," he said.

"Yes."

"I have fought my son for nine battles."

"You have not fought him. You have both refused to." Her voice came out quick and low, desperate, and she hated how it sounded, how like the truth. "That is what I am telling you, Jabari. Look at what you have done. He could have crushed your left wing at the river and he did not. You could have taken his baggage train at the pass and you let it go. Neither of you knew why. Your bodies knew. Your blood knew. Two men who have never met, and all summer they have been dancing round each other in the sand like boys in a ring, each waiting for the other to lower his hand."

He turned his head. His eyes were wild.

"What does he know?"

"Nothing. He believes his father was a Roman centurion who died in Pannonia. I told him so myself."

"You told him."

"I told him what a child can bear." She came to him across the carpet and stopped an arm's length away, with her hands open and her face lifted. "I am not asking you to forgive that. I am asking you to listen. Because I did not come here to beg for my life, or for the lives of Rome. I came for him."

"For him."

"For the one thing in this world that is yours and mine." The words came with a rush now, the long-prepared speech, but it did not feel like a speech. It felt like something tearing. "You have a hundred thousand men and a banner of fire, and you have a city on the coast that you mean to burn. Burn it, then, and what will you have? A desert and a grave. And he will be in that grave, Jabari, or you will, because one of you will make a mistake, one day, in a ford or a pass, in the dust at the end of a long summer, and the other will not."

"Stop."

"I have lain awake and seen it. Every night. The sun going down on a field, and two men with swords—"

"Stop."

It was a roar. It shook the lamp on its chain. But the moment the word was out she saw his face change, saw the great shoulders sag, saw the hand drop from the wall. He stood there trembling from head to foot, like a horse that has been run to its limit, and when he spoke again it was in a whisper.

"What do you want?"

Now, she thought. Now. Do not hurry.

"I want what I have wanted since the night I carried him," said Claudia. "I want him to live. I want you both to live. And I think there is a way."

…

She told him the plan sitting on the edge of the bed, in the soft light, with her hands in her lap and her voice as quiet as a woman reading to a sick child.

Rome was weak. She did not hide that. The treasury was empty, the Emperor was dying, and the Senate would eat itself with its own knives within the year. A treaty could be had. She could bring him one, sealed in the proper form, with the proper oaths, giving the south bank of the sea to Kavanu in perpetuity: the grain coast, the ports, the salt, the free passage of the caravans. All that he had fought for. All, and more. And in exchange there would be one condition, a small one, that cost him nothing. The Dux of the Roman armies would be named co-ruler of both shores. Not a hostage, not a vassal. A prince of both bloods, with a Roman name from his mother and a Kavanu name from his father, raised by the Senate to the purple and acclaimed by the elders in the desert, to hold between his two hands the two halves of the great sea. The war would end because there would be nothing left to fight about. There would be one house, one line, one throne.

"One king in Carthage and one in Rome," she said. "And the same blood in both."

He sat down beside her. He did it slowly. He sat staring at the floor between his boots, and she watched his big scarred hands open and close on his knees.

"A king," he said. "My son."

"The first of a line that is neither Roman nor Kavanu, but both. He would be the end of the war, Jabari. He would be the only man that either side could follow." She laid her hand over his. It was shaking. She did not know whose hand it was that shook. "I have thought of nothing else for ten days. I have thought of how it might be, if we had been permitted. A boy with your eyes who could sit in a hall in Rome and speak to the senators in their own language, and then go home in the evening to a tent in the desert and eat with his father's people. That is all I ever wanted. Do you understand? That is all that I wanted from the first."

"You would give him a crown," said Jabari.

"I would give him a country. Two. I would give him you."

It was the last thing she had meant to say, and it came out of her before she could stop it, in a small cracked voice that was nothing like the voice of the regent of Rome. For an instant they looked at one another with something that was almost horror. Then his hand turned under hers and closed on it, hard, enough to hurt.

"He would not know me," he said.

"He would know you the moment he saw you."

"He would hate me. He believes that I am a monster."

"He has been told so. He has not been told the truth." She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, and felt the great body shudder. "He has a half of the sun, Jabari. Round his neck. He has worn it every day since he was a child. I think it is the only thing he has ever loved that did not love him back."

He made a sound.

It was a small sound, hardly louder than a breath, and she did not look up at first because she thought he was about to speak. Then the muscle beneath her cheek jerked once, hard, and she drew back a little and saw his face.

He was weeping.

It was not like the night before. There was no sobbing, no bowed head, no convulsive struggle against himself. He sat upright and quite still, with his eyes wide open and fixed on the wall, and the tears ran down his cheeks and into his beard in two bright unbroken streams, steadily, silently, as water runs from a spring. His expression did not change at all. His lips were slightly parted. He looked, she thought, like a man listening to music in another room. He did not wipe the tears away. He did not seem to know they were there. When she put her fingers to his cheek they came away wet, and he did not so much as blink.

"Jabari," she whispered.

"Yes."

"You are crying."

"Am I?" He lifted his free hand, slowly, and touched his face, and looked at his wet fingers with a kind of dim astonishment. "I had thought that I had forgotten how."

She could not speak.

She sat there beside him on the narrow bed, with her hand in his and the grey morning light creeping across the carpet, and a strange thing happened inside her. It was as though a window had opened somewhere, a long way off, in a house she had thought was shut. For the length of a heartbeat she saw the whole shape of what she was doing: the handsome, tragic, exquisite structure she had built, with its true words laid one on another like bricks, and in the middle of it a man weeping for joy, and at the end of it a field, and two swords, and a sun going down.

Stop, said some small voice, very far away. Stop it now. Tell him all of it. There is still time.

Then the moment passed, as it always did, and the window closed, and she lifted her free hand and wiped the tears from his face with her thumb, gently, the way she had once, long ago, wiped blood from a wound on his shoulder with a corner of her shift.

"It will be well," said Claudia. "I promise you. It will be well."

And Jabari, the Sun that Rose Twice, the man who had burned six cities and never wept for one of them, bowed his great grey head and laid it against her shoulder like a tired child, and believed her.