A Conspiracy of Kings (16 page)

“Not very considerate of the god.”

“It was a particularly fine goat, a nanny with a silky
coat, and best of all, she answered to her name, Eleutheria. As
long as you called her by name, she would come when she was called
and stay when she was told and give fine milk. And Polystrictes was
very pleased.”

“And?”

“The next day Ocrassus brought him another goat. Named
Eleuthemia. She was also very fine and answered to her
name.”

“And another goat after that?” Sounis asked.

“Yes, Nigella, and Noxe, and Omerga, and Omerxa, which you
understand was easy to confuse with Omerga, and—”

“And so on,” said Sounis.

“And so on,” said Eddis. “Hundreds of goats, a
new one every day, and poor Polystrictes was forever running
around, calling, ‘Nigella! Nogasta! Come down from the
roof!’ ‘Poppy! Promiseteus! Pausanius! Stop eating the
lettuce at once!’ ‘Zenia, Zeta, and Zara, come to be
milked!’ While the goats ran wild and ate through all the
flowers in the courtyard and the vegetables in the garden and a
great deal of the family’s laundry besides. The god brought a
new goat every day, and poor Polystrictes couldn’t say no.
One does not refuse the gifts of the god without a certain amount
of peril. So Polystrictes stayed up all night, every night,
reciting their names over so he wouldn’t forget them. Finally
Ocrassus came and found him, surrounded by goats, all of them
chewing through the shrubbery and some even chewing the sleeves on
Polystrictes’s tunic as he sat at the edge of his fountain
fast asleep.”

“And then what happened?” Sounis asked. Eddis had
stopped when she realized they had reached the outer limits of the
garden. Above them, Attolia’s guard passed on the
palace’s outer walls. She looked over a shoulder at the
tracks they had made in the long shell-covered path behind them,
but Sounis, not yet ready to go back, turned to follow the wall
around the garden instead.

“Ocrassus gave him a dog,” Eddis replied. “It
was the first dog, and Polystrictes thought it was a wolf and ran
to hide. The god had to search for him to ask, ‘Polystrictes,
why are you in the well?’ Polystrictes said,
‘It’s a wolf.’ And Ocrassus said,
‘It’s a dog.’

“‘Wolf.’

“‘Dog.’

“‘Wolf.’

“‘Polystrictes,’ said Ocrassus, looking down
the well, ‘which one of us is a god?’ And Polystrictes
had to bite his tongue and climb out. The god showed him how the
dog would follow his commands and keep his goats out of the
laundry. So Polystrictes didn’t have to remember all those
names anymore. He had to remember only one, the
dog’s.”

“Alas,” said Sounis. “My problem is barons,
not goats, and I have no dog.”

“True, but staying up all night, reciting over your
difficulties, won’t help you any more than it did
Polystrictes.” Eddis turned him around, and they started back
toward the palace. “We will be missed,” she said.
“And you will not want people who think we are deep in a
discussion of the rights of the Neutral Islands to learn that we
were instead talking about goats.”

“I cannot crush a rebellion with so few men,” Sounis
protested.

They had met at last to discuss the army that he would lead back
to Sounis. In addition to the kings of Attolia and Sounis and the
queens of Attolia and Eddis, there were advisors and ministers and
officers of the army. Sounis wanted to say more but was afraid to
embarrass himself in front of the men he would be ordering into a
war. It seemed a pitifully small number of troops that the king of
Attolia was offering, much smaller than Sounis had expected. He
looked at the magus to see if he, too, was surprised, but the magus
was looking at his hands. Sounis looked at Attolia, and she only
stared back. No doubt she had overcome her own rebels with ten men
and a penknife.

Eugenides said, “These are the Eddisians who have been
exerting a peaceful influence throughout Attolia since I became
Attolis. They are Eddis’s best mercenaries, and we will pay
Eddis the gold for them. These are the best of our Attolian forces
as well. We cannot send any artillery, and you couldn’t use
it anyway. It would only slow you down. We are taking it on faith
that the Medes will not arrive on our doorstep while you have them
with you, and that Baron Erondites won’t rise up inside our
dooryard before you return them. We will need them back,” he
added.

Eddis watched without speaking. She could see that Sounis was
alarmed, but there was little she could say that would help. The
numbers were small, and the challenge he faced was enormous.

“It is just as likely that the Medes will arrive on
my
doorstep,” said Sounis. “What
then?”

Attolia explained. “In either case, we have an invasion
that the Great Powers of the Continent cannot fail to notice, and
we all have to do the best we can. It is most likely that the Medes
would land on our shores, rather than sailing around us to land on
yours. Moreover, any attack on their part would reveal their plans
to conquer Sounis, not ally with it, and strengthen your position
as king—if you have convinced your barons that you are king.
You cannot risk being seen as the head of an Attolian invasion. We
do not have the troops to send in any case, but as a matter of
strategy, overwhelming force will make you less king, not
more.”

Later Eugenides did not invite Sounis to his rooms so much as
summon him there. They were to have a private discussion, or at
least a conversation as private as anything could be in the
overpopulated palace. Feeling as sullen as a schoolboy, Sounis
followed an attendant to the appointment only to find, when he
reached the guardroom of the king’s apartments, that the door
to the bedchamber was closed. With rising irritation, Sounis
waited. The fancy guards looked elsewhere, but the attendants
watched him with what he thought was concealed amusement. He set
his teeth and stared back at each of them in turn. They all found
something else to look at, except Ion, who smiled and bowed and
asked if the king of Sounis would like some refreshment. Sounis was
hungry, but he declined when he saw that the door to
Eugenides’s bedchamber was opening.

Two men strode through the open door and across the guardroom.
One was Galen, the personal physician of the queen of Eddis. The
other, Sounis didn’t recognize but assumed from his green
sash that he served the same function for Eugenides. Both walked
with the stiff-legged gait of the bitterly offended, and Sounis
warily refrained from greeting Galen, though he had met him several
times in Eddis.

“Your Majesty?” Hilarion spoke from the doorway,
ushering Sounis into the room, where Eugenides waited. The king of
Attolia was again seated on the upholstered bench. He nodded to
Sounis to take a seat that had been pulled up nearby. His
unapproachable expression was just the same, and Sounis decided not
to ask what had upset Galen. So long as Gen maintained his
impersonal role, Sounis meant to do the same.

Eugenides’s attendants moved in and out of his bedchamber
while he and Sounis talked, but Gen ignored them as if they
didn’t exist. Taking his cue, Sounis did the same. Hoping for
some reassurance that he would be able to subdue his rebel barons,
Sounis was disappointed. He and Eugenides talked about the Mede and
their history, and the balance of power on the Peninsula. The
conversation was stilted and awkward.

Only as the interview was ending did Eugenides say directly,
“You must be king. You cannot be anyone’s puppet if we
are to have a chance against the Mede.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Sounis stiffly.

He rose to leave and was halfway to the door when Eugenides
asked, “Does the wardrobe suit?”

Sounis turned back. Eugenides was looking into his wine cup, and
Sounis wasn’t sure how to answer. Had he failed to thank the
king appropriately? Was he supposed to admire the gifts more? He
knew that Eugenides paid a great deal of attention to such things,
but to Sounis they were just clothes. “The pockets are sewn
on the inside,” he said. He couldn’t imagine why
someone would want to keep something in a pocket he couldn’t
easily reach, and these were particularly useless, too deep and too
narrow to get his hand into.

Eugenides shrugged one shoulder. “I sometimes find them
useful,” he said into his wine cup.

“Well,” said Sounis, “perhaps I will, too.
Thank you.”

“Be blessed in your endeavors,” said Eugenides,
using the universal Eddisian phrase for
please
and
thank you
and
you’re
welcome
.

“And you,” said Sounis, aping his formality.

When the king of Sounis was gone, Eugenides’s attendants,
waiting in the guardroom, heard the wine cup smash.

Philologos stood, saying wearily, “I’ll clean it
up,” and went to fetch a cloth.

It was a gloomy Sounis that made his way from the private
apartments of the king of Attolia to his own suite. He followed his
borrowed attendant, paying little attention to his surroundings,
until Ion suddenly slowed and Sounis nearly ran into the back of
him. In an apparent coincidence, no doubt meticulously prearranged
by the Mede ambassador, Melheret and his retinue were just climbing
the stairs as Sounis arrived at the head of them. It would be
impolite not to draw back and leave the landing free for those
ascending.

“Your Majesty,” said the ambassador, pausing to bow
where he stood with one foot on a higher step and his hands
bunching the fabric of his flowing trousers, lifting them as a
woman lifts the hem of a dress. If it was an oddly delicate
greeting, it was also blatantly self-assured. The Mede ambassador
had no concerns about being taken at a disadvantage and made that
much clear.

“Ambassador Melheret.” Sounis returned the address,
bowing politely back.

Melheret continued up the remaining steps to the landing,
brushed the wrinkles from his clothes, and bowed again. He was as
tall as Sounis, but more slender, with gray in his beard and in the
hair at his temples. His narrow face was weathered by time in the
sun, and he had probably been a soldier before he became an
ambassador. He gave the appearance of good health and radiated a
confidence that Sounis envied.

“A god-sent opportunity that we meet, Your Majesty,”
Melheret said. “I was just returning to my rooms, in
anticipation of a bottle of remchik, which my secretary informs me
has arrived. Perhaps you would care to join me?”

Sounis looked to Ion, who bowed to indicate his willingness to
wait for as long as the king of Sounis desired. Sounis cursed
inwardly, certain this meeting had been arranged for a moment when
he was without the magus to act as a mediator. There was no polite
way to refuse.

The Mede’s apartments were as luxurious as Sounis’s,
but the Mede seemed to have been unimpressed by them. In the
reception room, where Sounis waited for his host to reappear, cloth
tapestries hung from hooks that had been hammered into the plaster
walls with no care taken for the decorations already painted there,
and Sounis wondered if it was an attempt to obscure spy holes. If
so, he doubted it would be successful.

The Attolian furniture was pushed into the corners, and several
replacement pieces of Medean design, small enough to have been
shipped with the ambassador, had been put in their place. Mede
statuettes of gods or goddesses or, Sounis supposed, fertility
figures were scattered around the room, clashing with the rest of
the Attolian background. The combined effect made Sounis wince.

The Mede ambassador returned carrying a ceramic bottle and two
beautiful wine cups. They were glass, a deep blue in color,
decorated on the outsides with bas-relief dancers carved in white.
Sounis, taking his cup, admired it, running a finger across the
raised figures.

“They are lovely, are they not?” said the Mede.
“They come from a workshop in our capital. The artist has
made a glass service for the emperor himself.”

Holding the cup up to the light from a nearby lamp, Sounis could
see that the glass had two layers, white on the outside and blue on
the inside. The effect was achieved by carving away the white
layer, leaving only the images of white dancers on the blue
background. He had never seen anything like it.

“Our artisans have worked for centuries to perfect their
art,” said Melheret, as if no Sounisian artisans had ever
done the same. “Some believe art is the greatest product of
an enduring civilization.”

Following a wave of the Mede’s hand, Sounis chose a seat
and sat in it gingerly. It was low to the ground, and the slanted
seat tipped him against the curving back, making him wish he had
pulled one of the more traditional chairs away from the wall. It
wouldn’t be easy to get up in a hurry—say, if armed men
leaped from behind the wall hangings.

“You need not fear being attacked, Your
Majesty.”

Sounis suppressed a flinch before realizing that the Mede was
not reading his thoughts about the furniture.

“Our nation is one of peace and great prosperity. We are
not so poor of resources that we steal from our neighbors. Try the
remchik?” Melheret had filled his glass.

Sounis took a drink, as he had seen the Mede do, tossing the
contents of the glass cup into his mouth all at once. The liquid
Melheret had poured was clear, so he knew it wasn’t wine, but
he was still taken aback by the powerful alcohol. It went up his
nose and seared his throat all the way down to the pit of his
stomach. He tried to hold his breath but only succeeded in turning
a cough into a whistle. When he inhaled, his breath burned as much
as the alcohol had.

“Do you like it?” asked the Mede.

“It’s…delicious,” Sounis said politely.
His eyes were watering.