Read Online Coalition of Lions by Elizabeth Wein - Free Book Online

of trees and animals and villages, all leading to a wide plateau with a geometric Aksumite church perched on its flat height. Below the church there lurked a serpent the size of an elephant, stretching its fearsome coils up the cliff side.
    “What on earth is that?” I asked. “Have they got a dragon to guard you there?”
    “The saint who founded the monastery was lifted to the top of the amba plateau by a flying serpent,” Priamos said. “Or so the stories say. In its place now they have a leather rope. There is no other way in or out.”
    “You’d be very safe,” said Telemakos.
    “Some people go there for sanctuary,” Priamos said. “But my brother Mikael has spent his life imprisoned there, and that is not the same thing at all.”
    Priamos closed the book and reached out to lay it atop one of the stacks I had made. Beneath his shamma his arms were bare, and I noticed again the small, stick scars on his wrists. They were so faded you could only see them when they caught the light.
    “Goewin wants to meet your mother,” Telemakos said. “Will you take us to her, Ras Priamos?”
    “That I will do with pleasure, Telemakos Meder. I may not stay, though.”
    Candake the queen of queens, negeshta nagashtat, was enormous. I have since heard many people call her beautiful, as Telemakos did, and so she is; but still Caleb’s elder sister was bigger than any human being I have ever seen. She must have weighed as much as a small buffalo. She was not able to move as quickly as a buffalo, though, and was surrounded by a swarm of attendants who helped her to sit and to stand, and who seemed to feed her constantly. Her hair had gone salt white, and there were dozens of fine gold chains woven into her tight plaits. She was wonderful, and terrifying; in her own way, eerily, much like my aunt Morgause.
    “Ah, you bring her to me at last, Priamos! How I have longed to see this girl! The queen of queens beholds the—what did you call her in the tribunal?”
    “Queen of kings,” Telemakos supplied.
    I wondered, Where did you pick up that?
    “The queen of kings.” Candake creased and cackled with uncontrollable laughter, and leaned forward to grab Telemakos’s hands and swing them back and forth as though she were dancing with him. “Queen of kings! Like Cleopatra!” I thought she was going to choke herself laughing. “Or Makeda, the queen of Sheba, the mother of us all! Ah, Priamos, no other of my children could have been destined to speak as the mouth of the king; you have the flyaway tongue of a catbird.
    “Girl, do you know what he said when he came before my brother Caleb for the first time, what he called the negus? ‘Solomon,’ he said. ‘Solomon walks among us in your wisdom.’ And Caleb said it was bad enough he had a base traitor in one nephew, without another being a groveling sycophant.”
    “My lady mother, I am supposed to go and repeat to my old tutor what little I have learned of the British tongue,” Priamos interrupted quickly. “I will leave you alone with the princess.”
    Candake paused for breath, chuckling and wheezing. “Priamos was sick, sick with nerves. After the presentation to Caleb they took the children out to see the animals, and he vomited into the lion pit.”
    One of Priamos’s guards was twitching in his attempt to keep a straight face. “Go, go!” Priamos said to them, turning quickly. “Tedla, Ebana, I swear I’ll have you whipped for insolence. Go! I am late.” He drove the guards before him with his arms spread wide, abandoning me to his mother.
    “Coward!” I called after him, laughing.
    “No coward,” his mother grunted darkly. “He will find little time for idle sport this winter. The bala heg are going to keep him busy.”
    Telemakos settled himself comfortably at the grand woman’s feet. He leaned low to the floor and chirruped softly. Three slender cats the color of sand, with faint stripes across their noses and tails, came slinking out from beneath