The King of Attolia (25 page)

“I hadn’t talked to you since the attack,” said Aris, as angry as Costis. “How was I to know? Costis, you owe him. You knocked him flat on his back, and he let you off. How was I to know,” he said again, “that he didn’t call in his debt and that you didn’t let him get away with it because of your confounded asinine patron sense of honor?”

“You should have known!” Costis was shouting and made himself stop. He didn’t know up from down anymore. He didn’t know right from wrong and couldn’t make sense of the simplest events. He’d been nothing but blindsided by every tortuous twist in his life since the Thief of Eddis became king. Why should he expect Aris to know more? “I apologize. I am very sorry.” He stepped away.

“Costis, wait.” Aris clutched at his sleeve. Costis shook him off, and this time Aris didn’t try to hold him.

In the morning, Costis was summoned to the office of the captain. Tersely, Teleus informed him that he was a squad leader again. He would have a squad, although not the same one as he had had before, nor in the same century. His belongings would be moved from his quarters near the other lieutenants to the rooms above the dining hall in one of the barracks. Just as tersely, Costis accepted his assignment, was dismissed, and headed for the door.

“Costis,” Teleus called him back. “If you show them that you are angry, it will only make every wild rumor that much more believable.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Costis. “I will try to remember.”

Costis didn’t announce his outrage to the Guard in a speech at dinner, but he met every sympathetic look with a challenging glare, daring anyone to suggest to his face that he was a liar. The squad Teleus had scripted for him had older unassigned men and a few trainees just out of the recruitment barracks. The older soldiers brought the trainees up to date, and they watched Costis with round eyes for the first few days. Costis might have been in a foul mood, but he was also fair, and they gave him no trouble.

On his off-duty nights Costis found he didn’t care for the company of the other guards and took himself down to the wineshops in the city of Attolia. Three times he ended up in fights. He must have acquired some particular curse, because what should have been a business of a few punches thrown turned to knives and broken furniture. The third time, he was picked up by the watch and taken before Teleus, who eyed him as if he were a stranger, and reminded him that he could be broken back to line soldier or dismissed from the Guard if he was a disgrace to his rank.

Costis tried to take the warning to heart, but was somehow fighting again the next day. He was outside a wine bar when two drunks accosted him, pretending to be veterans and demanding that he honor their service by buying them another bottle of wine. It was a common pitch, and Costis brushed by after refusing. The drunks took offense, and Costis would have come to a sticky end if a passing stranger hadn’t intervened. One of the drunken men grabbed Costis by the arm, while the other pulled a wicked beltknife from his tunic. Fortunately, the stranger was there to drop a stool from the wine bar onto the head of the knife-wielding assailant. When the drunks saw their advantage was gone, they quickly lost interest in the fight and stumbled off. Costis thanked the stranger, who looked at the crowd that was gathering and suggested that he and Costis should both slip away as well, before they
found themselves explaining the event to the city’s watchmen. Costis thought it was a wise suggestion and managed to blend in with the crowd and head back to the barracks without another reason to be called before the Captain of the Guard.

Sitting on his bed, unlacing his sandals, Costis admitted to himself that he had been spoiling for a fight. Every day he’d told himself that the king didn’t need him anymore and so had dismissed him—there was no insult in that. He had been valuable to his king, and he should be happy knowing that much. Kings are kings and incomprehensible. Eugenides had revealed that in the palace garden. Costis misunderstood. That was all. He reminded himself that he was better off than the king’s attendants, who were laughingstocks for their persisting wariness and deference to Eugenides. No one believed the warnings they’d sounded after the fall of Erondites. If the members of the court were more cautious in dealing with the king, it was because they believed that he was now the instrument of the queen. To the court, Costis had heard, the king seemed as harmless as ever and the attendants looked ridiculous. Costis should be happy he was spared that. He went to bed wishing he believed everything he told himself.

Aris meanwhile paced in his own tiny quarters not far away. He was still serving in the palace, while Costis
was not. Their working paths never crossed, and Costis always seemed to have disappeared into the city when Aris was looking for him. Aristogiton wanted to know who had first started the rumor that the assassination had been faked. He was afraid that he already knew, and that it was Laecdomon.

T
HE
Queen of Eddis sat at a desk scattered with papers. There was ink on her fingers and a smudge on one cheek. She looked up from her work and smiled when the Magus of Sounis was introduced to the room. “How is my honored prisoner?” she asked.

The magus wrapped his robes tighter and sat in the chair by the desk. “I am enduring my captivity very well,” he said. “But I cannot find a morning chill refreshing, and I would like to return to my nice warm country.”

“You know that you may go when you like,” said Eddis.

“Unfortunately, my nice warm country is consuming itself in a civil war, and there are too many people who would slit my throat if they could. One of whom being the king, who may still hold it against me that I was abstracted from his service by your nefarious, underhanded, incorrigible former Thief. My ‘confinement’
will have to continue until Sounis sends for me.”

“You heard this morning in the court about the progress Sounis has made. It won’t be long until things are settled and he negotiates your release. I will miss you when you go.”

He smiled at her fondly. “No less than I will miss you, Helen. Did you send for me for a reason?”

“I thought you might like to see Ornon’s latest report.”

“I would,” said the magus. “Did it come by the diplomatic pouch, or has he sent home another assistant ambassador?”

“It came by the regular route. He is growing anxious.”

“Gen is still acting the buffoon?”

“Yes, but Ornon has begun to worry more about getting what he wished for. You’ve heard about the fall of Erondites?”

“I did, but what has Ornon been wishing for?”

“Well, he didn’t approve of the tactics of his assistant, but he has been trying every way that he thinks might work to get Eugenides to take the reins of power. Mostly, I think he’s put his faith in rational argument, and he lectures Gen every opportunity he gets. It has only just dawned on him that if he succeeds, Eugenides will be King of Attolia.”

“And this is not happy news?”

“King,” Eddis emphasized, “of Attolia.”

“I see,” said the magus, and he did. “We will have a
very powerful king, and a powerful queen as well, as our neighbors. But also, a committed ally,” the magus pointed out. “You did not release him from his oaths of loyalty to you.”

Eddis shook her head. “Eugenides never took any oaths of loyalty to me. The Thieves never swear loyalty to any ruler of Eddis, only to Eddis itself.”

She met the magus’s stunned look with a smile. “The Thieves of Eddis have always been uncomfortable allies to the throne, Magus. There is the niggling fear that if you fall out with a Thief, he might see it as his right and his responsibility to remove you. There are some checks, of course. There is only ever one Thief. They are prohibited from owning any property. Their training inevitably generates the isolation that makes them independent, but also keeps them from forming alliances that might become threats to the throne. It is not the folly you might think.”

“Why didn’t I know this?” the magus asked, his sense of his own scholarship deeply offended.

Eddis laughed. “Because no one ever talks about the Thief. Haven’t you noticed?”

The magus nodded. He had registered the superstitious reluctance to discuss the Thief or anything to do with the past Thieves of Eddis. It almost amounted to a taboo. He’d been trying to compile a more complete history of Eddis while he had access to the queen’s
library and had been puzzled to find no mention of the Thieves there.

“I did hear a rumor about Eugenides and a comment he made to the Captain of his Guard,” he said.

“Now how did you pick that up?” Eddis asked, amused.

“I got one of your guards drunk,” the magus admitted. “But I am right? The Thief of Eddis has a certain freedom to do whatever he wants?”

“And an accompanying responsibility,” the queen pointed out.

“Even without an oath,” the magus said, “you cannot believe that Eugenides would ever betray you or your interests?”

Eddis looked away. “If Sophos is gone—” she said.

“We don’t know that he is,” the magus interrupted. Like Eddis and Eugenides, he refused to give up hope for the missing heir of Sounis. More than either of them, he felt conscience-stricken to have been safe in Eddis when Sophos disappeared, even though his presence in Sounis would have meant little to the king’s nephew. The King of Sounis had forbidden the magus to continue educating his heir. He had feared the magus’s influence and had sent Sophos away from the capital city to be tutored by someone else.

“But if he is gone, if he is dead, and not a hostage somewhere,” the Queen of Eddis asked, “would you see me marry Sounis, then?”

She turned back to the magus, but he, in turn, had looked away. He answered very reluctantly, “Yes.”

No more needed to be said. They both understood that if Eugenides was King of Attolia, he would face difficult and painful decisions that he would make in the best interests of nations, not individuals, no matter how much he might love them.

Relius had been moved from the infirmary, but not into his own apartment. In his own rooms he would have been in the center of all his webs of intrigue, surrounded by the papers and codes and histories of his work. Those rooms, no doubt, had been locked up. Once emptied of his personal effects, they would be turned over in their entirety to the new Secretary of the Archives. The thought gave him no pain. It was surprising how remote his past life now seemed. His thoughts only pained him when he struggled to bring his previous work to mind, and he did not do that much. If he considered anything at length, it was some memory of his childhood or the flight of a bird past his window. Mostly he lay in his bed as blank and free from thought as a newborn baby. His days were immeasurably restful.

Darker thoughts crowded in during the deepest hours of the night when he woke listening to the secret mystifying sounds of the sleeping palace. Many nights, the king was there. Pleasant, irreverent, and distracting,
he eased Relius past nightmares and self-recrimination. Some nights he said nothing at all, just comforted with his presence. Other nights he related the events of his day, spewing out his insights and analyses of the Attolian court in a devastatingly funny critique that Relius suspected was as much a relief to the king as a distraction to Relius. Occasionally they talked about plays or poetry. Relius was surprised by the breadth of the king’s interest. He knew a great deal of history. Several nights they argued the interpretation of great events until Relius was exhausted.

The king’s arguments were spiced with “the magus says this” or “the magus thinks that.” Relius and the magus had crossed paths many times, never on academic matters, and Relius was fascinated by this revelatory view of an old opponent. He thought that when he had healed sufficiently, and withdrawn from the capital, he might write the magus a letter and open a correspondence on Euclid, or Thales, or the new idea from the north, that the sun and not the Earth might be in the center of the universe. As he healed and memories of the world he had moved in grew more distant, he imagined, very tentatively, a new life opening in front of him.

The lamp beside his bed was lit. If the king came this night, he would arrive soon. When the door opened after a light knock, he turned his head, but the greeting on his lips died, as his forgotten world crashed upon him like
a breaking wave. The king stood in the doorway, but not alone. His arm was linked through the queen’s and he guided her into the room. She stood by the bedside while Eugenides fetched a chair, and then she sat. Relius lay on the bed watching, unable to look away from her as she seemed unable to break from his gaze.

Eugenides looked from one silent face to another. “You must speak sometime.” He brushed his wife’s cheek with his hand and bent to kiss her softly on the cheek. Some of Relius’s longing must have showed on his face because the king turned to him with a smile.

“Jealous, Relius?” With no sign of embarrassment, or of jest, he brushed the former secretary’s hair back and kissed him as well.

It was laughable, surely, but as the king left, Relius blinked the water from his eyes. The kiss had been gentle, and the king’s eyes as he delivered it had not smiled.

The flame in the lamp guttered, the sound unnaturally loud. The queen spoke at last, saying softly, “I failed you, Relius.”

“No,” Relius protested. He lifted himself on his elbows, disregarding the dull aches such movement reawakened. It was imperative that the queen not mistake his culpability. “I failed. I failed you.” He added awkwardly, “Your Majesty.”

Sadly, she asked, “Am I no longer your queen, then?”

Shocked, he whispered, “Always,” breathing his soul into the word.

“I should have known that,” she said. “I should have had more hope for the future instead of re-creating the past.”

“You had no choice,” Relius reminded her.

“So I thought, that it was another
necessary
sacrifice, like so many we have made together. I was wrong. I did trust you, Relius, all these years; I shouldn’t have stopped.” She leaned forward and straightened the covers, smoothing the wrinkles from the white sheeting. “We cannot forgive ourselves,” she said. Relius knew that he would never forgive himself, that he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but he remembered what Eugenides had said about the queen’s needs. He had considered it during the lonely night hours in the infirmary. “Perhaps we could forgive each other?” the queen suggested.

Relius pressed his lips together, but nodded. He would accept a pardon he knew was undeserved if by doing so he could relieve his queen of any part of her burden.

The queen asked, “What do you think of my king now. Is he impetuous? Inexperienced?…Naive?” She repeated his words back to him. Her voice, reassuringly calm, achingly familiar, eased a little of his distress and shame.

“He is young,” Relius said hoarsely.

It was Attolia’s turn to look surprised, the slightest lifting of one eyebrow.

Relius shook his head. Tongue-tied, he had misspoken. “I meant that for ten years, or twenty…” He hesitated to put his thoughts into words, as if speaking them aloud might work against his hopes.

Attolia understood. “A golden age?”

Relius nodded. “He doesn’t see it. He doesn’t want to be king.”

“Did he say so?”

Relius shook his head. He hadn’t needed to be told. “We talked about poetry,” he said, still speaking hesitantly, “and about a new comedy by Aristophanes about farmers. He said you had chosen a small farm for me, and suggested I write a play about it.” Relius was a man whose entire life had depended on insight. “He didn’t marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.”

“He says he will not diminish my power or rule over my country. He intends to be a figurehead.”

“Don’t let him,” Relius said, and then pulled himself back, in case he had overreached. Gently his queen waved away his concern.

“Am I not sovereign enough, Relius?” she said. There was no smile on her face, but it was there in her voice, and Relius, who knew her every intonation, heard it and breathed more easily.

The queen said, “No matter how securely I hold the reins of power, so long as I had no husband, my barons had to fight, afraid that someone else might
seize that power. Only if they could be certain that that goal was out of their reach, and out of their neighbors’ reach as well, would there be peace, Relius. Oh, there are stupid men among them, and a few warmongers, but mostly, you and I know that they fight me because they are afraid of each other. If there were a king, secure in his power, the barons would unite.

“I have bought all the time I can against the coming of the Mede,” she said. “If Attolia is not united when they strike again, then we are all, king, queen, patronoi, and okloi, lost. But it is not up to me alone, Relius, whether or not Eugenides will be king or just appear as one.”

“He refuses?”

“He refuses to either defend or assert his position. He just…looks the other way and pretends he doesn’t hear. He cannot be led, or driven. The Eddisian Ambassador has tried everything, I think, including extortion, and failed. I think he is afraid.”

“Ornon or the king?”

“Both. Ornon looks more and more like a man at the edge of a precipice every day. But I think Eugenides is afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of failing,” said Attolia, as if that fear, at least, Relius should have recognized. “Of stealing my power from me.”

“You would only be stronger.”

“I know,” Attolia soothed him. “I did not say that I am afraid. He is, though, I think. Afraid of his own
desire for power. He is not unused to wielding power, but it has always been in secret. I could, of course, command him to be king. He will give me anything I ask.”

“That would only confirm your sovereignty, not his,” Relius objected.

“So,” agreed the queen.

Relius considered her, sitting beside him. She didn’t seem unduly concerned. “I am confident, My Queen, that if you have met your match, so has he.”

“He is stubborn,” Attolia reminded him, “and very strong.”

“Surely he revealed himself in the fall of Erondites?” Relius asked.

“The barons have come trooping through my bedchamber, to have a new look at him.”

“And?” prompted Relius.

“He simpers. He preens.”

Relius snorted. “I suppose that the barons reported that the plan must have been yours all along, that the king was your witless tool.”

“So.” The queen nodded. She looked down at her hands, lying quiet in her lap, while Relius imagined the scene the king must have enacted, no different from the scenes he himself had witnessed when the king was playing the fool.

“You must force him into the open,” Relius warned her.

She raised her head, and he was aghast to see her eyes bright with tears. “I am tired of driving people and forcing them to my will. I am like a war chariot with bladed wheels, scything down those closest to me, enemies and my dearest friends alike.”

“I failed you, My Queen,” Relius reminded her.