Free Coalition of Lions by Elizabeth Wein Page B

were no less than six men trying to pull him down, but Priamos seemed always to be a hairsbreadth ahead of them. Wazeb came wafting into the court as through drawn by the commotion. I could not see over all their heads, and stood on the edge of the fountain.
    “Priamos, stop!” I cried in dismay, slipping unhelpfully into Latin. “Oh, God, your hands! ” The chains were tearing them to shreds.
    Ityopis caught him by one arm and struggled with him, crying out desperately, “Sir, this is madness, madness! You have waited so patiently—”
    “I cannot sit here and look at them any longer,” Priamos gasped, gentle Priamos, and wrenched two more monkeys free before his guards and three soldiers and a butler dragged him to the ground.
    Seconds later Constantine dragged him up again by a length of his shamma, half choking him. “My God, the waste! The expense!” He struck Priamos viciously across the face. “Do you have any idea what it costs to keep this palace as Caleb ordered it? Or how much was thrown away on that twenty-year debacle in Himyar—”
    “Seventeen,” Priamos interrupted hotly. “Seventeen years it went on, not twenty.”
    Constantine hit him again.
    “Stop this!” I bellowed. “You idiots both—”
    “What do you know of Himyar?” Priamos blazed at Caleb’s viceroy, reckless with rebellion and outrage. “What do you know of Abreha? Have you ever been there? Have you ever seen him?”
    “I know Himyar, ” Constantine said. “I was in Sana last year as Caleb’s envoy, do you not remember? Abreha was so bold as to ask me to stay as his own ambassador! I know the face of treachery when I see it!”
    “Well, I am not Abreha!” Priamos cried out, so impassioned he was near to weeping.
    “Yet you insist on undermining my authority! You conspire with the princess who is to be my bride, you run riot in my court, and then you dare argue with me! I do not like these damned colobus any more than you do—”
    “So get rid of them! ”
    Constantine struck him a third time across the face, more coldly, as though in an effort to bring him to his senses. Priamos staggered, and was held up by his guards.
    “I am going to see you bound in this place as long as it takes to repair the walls,” Constantine said, his voice hard and controlled. “I do not care how noble a prince you are; I will not let you test my stewardship with such brass insolence. Let everyone see what you have done.”
    “My lord Ella Amida,” begged Ityopis, “in God’s name use reason in your punishment of him.”
    “Am I dealing with a reasonable man? I would as soon have him flayed! Look about you!”
    And the Golden Court was a ruin. Water leaked from a crack in the fountain wall where the marble had been torn out, monkeys roared and barked in the ceiling, potted trees lay uprooted and overturned, marble fragments strewed the floor.
    “At least give him a choice,” said Wazeb in his light, casual way.
    Constantine pressed his lips together tightly; his nostrils flared. “He shall be chained here so long as it takes to mend the walls. Three days, perhaps. I do not have it in me to be gentler than this.”
    Priamos winced and shrank as though he had been struck again. “Three—” He swallowed, and bit at his lower lip. “Three—” Then he seemed to retch, as though the very words he tried to speak were so loathsome that he could not hold them in his mouth. “Three years or three minutes, it is all the same to me. I would sooner be flayed.”
    Constantine paused for a long moment, and then said levelly, “Would you?”
    “Yes.” Priamos answered without hesitation.
    “A choice,” repeated Wazeb.
    Constantine sighed and glanced at Ityopis. “Just so. Ras Priamos, if you will not be bound here, then you will take a score’s lash stripes on each palm. Choose.”
    “My God, Constantine,” I cried out. “Only look at his hands!”
    Priamos looked down at them himself, as if noticing for the first time the