Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Maybe he has pots that need tinning.”

  “Do you know how to do that?” The Attolian had given the slaves most of the money when he’d divided up the slavers’ possessions, but he’d kept the bag of tin coins from the mines. I certainly didn’t know what to do with them.

  The Attolian nodded. “My friend was the son of the village tinsmith. My father wouldn’t let me apprentice there, he wouldn’t hear of it, but I learned a fair bit in spite of that.”

  That was an interesting tidbit about my Attolian. I’d thought soldiers were born to be soldiers.

  “Tell him I can re-tin his pots so they can be cooked in, but no guarantees on how pretty they will be.”

  I explained to the farmer what the Attolian was offering and asked if he had any pots in need of new tin. The farmer was just saying no when a woman’s muffled shout came from inside the farmhouse.

  There was a heated exchange between indoors and outdoors that ended with Hemke throwing up his hands and agreeing that we could have a meal and as much water as we could carry if we could re-tin their largest baking pan. “You’ll have to make her happy,” warned Hemke. I could guess that wouldn’t be easy.

  “I’ll need lye,” said the Attolian to me, “and some tallow or beeswax. And fireplace tongs.”

  Hemke had already headed back into the goat shed, flapping a hand in introduction over his shoulder as he went. We hesitantly poked our heads around the corner of the low stone building to find the matriarch of the family in the doorway there. Some years older than Hemke, his mother or perhaps an aunt, she was gray haired and whip thin, with the wrinkles brought both by age and by hard work in the sun. She gave us the once-over.

  “You can do this, tin a baking pan?” I asked the Attolian under my breath.

  “So, so, so,” said the Attolian. He sounded entirely confident, but I noticed his hands anxiously rubbing together as he spoke. The old woman noticed, too, and rolled her eyes before she invited us into the kitchen to gather up the pan and the material the Attolian would need.

  “Vedra will bring the lye and the tallow. How much lye?”

  “We’ll need to soak the pan in it. Half as much lye in the water as if we were making soap,” said the Attolian.

  The woman nodded. “Eat first,” she said, and we gratefully fell on some bread and cheese while she and the woman she called Vedra found a container large enough to hold the baking pan—a monster of a pan. As wide across as the length of my arm, it probably weighed more than my master’s cashbox when it was brimming with coin.

  The Attolian handled it easily. Carrying it and the ceramic bath the old woman found to soak it in, he went out to the hearth and set up his tin shop. Vedra followed with a jar of powdered lye and a lump of beeswax. She was a grown woman, but clearly under the thumb of the matriarch, who we later learned was mother to her and her brothers—one of whom was Hemke and the other of whom was out with the goats.

  The Attolian filled the ceramic bath and measured the powdered lye into it, stirring with a wooden stick before he set the baking pan to soak. Then he started a fire in the brick hearth and put a long-handled pot of beeswax to heat on its flat stone top. The hearth bricks had once been covered in plaster, but most of that now lay in flakes in the dirt below, and the stone top was cracked right across. The disrepair didn’t seem to interfere with its function, though. Where the heat leaked up through the crack, the Attolian set the wax to melt. Most of the heat still came up through the circular hole the size of a dinner plate in the middle of the stone.

  The foot pedal for the hearth was broken, so first the Attolian repaired that with a new piece of wood and the spare sandal leather he still had from Koadester. Then he fed the fire and worked the pedal until he had something that was even hotter than the sun out on the salt pans. He was dripping with sweat, and the old woman unbent enough to send Vedra out with ceramic cups of cool water scented with lemon for both of us. I hadn’t earned it and gave him mine.

  The Attolian checked the pan occasionally, pulling it out of the lye bath and looking at the color, then letting it slide back into the acrid liquid. When it was bright pink, he decided it had set long enough and dried it above the hearth before he rubbed the beeswax all over the interior surface. While he worked, he sang in a surprisingly tuneful voice a song about a girl a soldier left behind.

  He sent me to get a cloth from Vedra, whom I found leaning against the doorpost with the old woman, both of them listening to the song with expressions soft and distant. The old woman slapped Vedra on the arm and sent her to fetch a rag. Then the Attolian began to work in earnest, pumping the fire with the pedal and holding the pan over the heat with the fire tongs until it was heated through. He turned it up on edge, slightly tipped, and set it into the hole in the hearthstone so that he didn’t need to bear its entire weight as he threw the flattened pellets of tin a couple at a time onto the side of the pan. He rotated the pan as the tin melted, and after dipping the folded rag into the liquid beeswax, he rubbed the melting tin smooth. Again and again he threw in the tin until the entire inside edge of the pan was coated.

  It’s all very straightforward to tell it, but there was a great deal of wobbling of the pot and swearing in Attolian. The beeswax and water mixture steamed like a miniature storm cloud, and the cloth caught fire several times for added excitement and more swearing. The Attolian had a wide-ranging vocabulary, really. Curses from at least four languages.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the old woman and Vedra still watching, very amused.

  When the sides were finished, the Attolian tipped the pan onto its bottom and flung an entire handful of tin into it. Elbow grease and the beeswaxed cloth smoothed the tin down, and he added another layer and another. It was late in the day by this time, and Hemke’s brother had come in from the fields, as well as several other men bringing in their goats. They’d probably been sleeping for most of the afternoon in the shade of a rocky outcrop. They looked curiously at the Attolian working in the heat and conferred with Vedra before disappearing into the farmhouse and the other outbuildings.

  Finally, the Attolian let the pan cool, and when it was safe to touch with a bare hand, he held it out for the old woman’s appraisal. The interior shone like the sun, but the tin had overreached the edge in places and run in untidy streaks down the outside of the pan. The old woman pointed these out. The Attolian shrugged.

  Vedra looked both anxious and hopeful, but the Attolian seemed at his ease. At last the old woman nodded her conditional approval, and Hemke invited us in to dinner. He told us we could spend the night in the shed with the goats and even suggested we make ourselves at home in the washhouse, the concerns about water scarcity evidently having faded. I believe he had worried less about the water and more about appearing weak in front of strangers, especially one built like the Attolian.

  After dinner there was singing. The Attolian sang another song, a slower mournful one, which I translated for the company. It was about a man who missed his home, and I didn’t really need to say more than that. By the time we left the next day, we were all friends. The old woman told Vedra to give us a large package of food for our trip, and we left her the remaining bits of tin to mend her pots in the future. We filled our skins again at the well, then turned toward the Taymets. We’d reached the first slopes by noon and rested in the shade before we began to climb again. I was sure we were doomed, but I was determined to go on until I dropped.

  To my surprise, the going was easier, at least at first, than in those hellish rocky gullies around the mines. There were trails to follow that climbed with some consideration for the people who might be using them, not just for goats. Hemke, without commenting on the Attolian’s heavy accent or our somewhat unorthodox arrival at his farm, had casually suggested that there were ways to go north while avoiding farms on the route and without going by the emperor’s roads. I had translated the directions quietly into Attolian, and the Attolian seemed confident he could follow them. He was picking hi
s way along the hunting trails with little hesitation, whereas I could only guess how lost I would already be if I were on my own.

  Eleven days later we climbed over a low stone wall and entered a grove of olives, the huge trees in orderly rows, their leaves casting deep twilight below them. I looked back through the twisting branches at the sun shining on the fearsome Taymets, now unequivocally behind us.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I’d been afraid to say it before, for fear of drawing down a curse on our heads.

  It’s true that some of the climbs had been terrifying, and we’d spent most of four miserable days with our feet in the snow, but there had almost always been a trail to follow, even if it was just the path of someone else’s footsteps. We’d sheltered in caves where we’d found firewood stacked and waiting for us. Twice the Attolian had used his bow to bring down a wild goat. We’d eaten and slept well, and Hemke’s detailed directions had delivered us safely to Zaboar. We might have seen no other human being for the entirety of our journey across the mountains, but we’d seen evidence of them everywhere.

  Whatever lay ahead, I had climbed the Taymets. If I could do it, what stopped the Medes?

  “There’s a saying from Eddis,” the Attolian told me. “Water finds a way. A few people at a time can trickle through, but you couldn’t take an army on that trail. A man can’t climb straight up with his face in someone else’s feet and his feet in the face of the man below. It would take an army a month or more to cross the mountains. Not only would they starve, they’d be picked off by the locals. They’d never get enough men through to be of any use in a battle.”

  That made sense to me. “The Namreen can come through, right after us,” I said. They were never not on my mind.

  “They could. Or they could just use the trade road,” said the Attolian laconically. “The oligarch might object—or he might not.” He shrugged. “You won’t be entirely safe, Kamet, until I get you to my king in Attolia, but we are out of the empire. That will make it harder for anyone, bounty hunter or Namreen, to take you back.”

  Side by side, we walked downhill between the trees to the lower side of the olive grove. The contrast between the salt pans behind us and the fertile country before us was diametric. The Taymets captured all the rain that blew south, and the water ran back down into Zaboar, making it a small but healthy city-state, with farms to feed its populations and the mountains to protect it. It was almost, but not quite, worth the effort to conquer, and it paid a tribute to the Medes to ensure they looked elsewhere to expand their empire. The oligarch might see the Namreen as a threat to his sovereignty—or he might see handing me over as a goodwill gesture to a dangerous neighbor.

  Looking out across the green land, all the way to the coast, I could see the blue of the Shallow Sea. The Attolian said he could not only see the city on its shore, he could trace the man-made lines of the aqueducts converging on it.

  “There is an Attolian trade house in the city,” he said. “They will know me and will help find a ship that will take us at least to the Middle Sea and perhaps all the way home.”

  We walked along the wall to a broken gate and a beaten path outside it. The path led us onto another path, wide enough for a wagon to bring down the olives, and from there every step brought us closer to civilization. The air was cool and the sky clear. It was an easy trip down the farm tracks, and we eventually caught sight of a town below us. The Attolian insisted he could see a sign for a tavern in the open market square, but I suspected it was wishful thinking.

  The town was unwalled. Wandering between the houses, we found ourselves at the open village square, not large, with a tree-lined edge and a central cobblestoned area around a spring-fed fountain. There was indeed a tavern with tables under a shaded porch, and the Attolian was smug. He led the way toward it without hesitation. He wasn’t worrying about the Namreen. Inside, he chatted up the tavern wife—the people in Zaboar mostly speak the same language as the Medes—and if she had trouble with some of his heavily accented words, she understood he wanted to buy food. He understood in turn when she held her nose. Blushing, he admitted that we didn’t have coin for a meal and a bath, but she kindly produced a ball of soap and a cloth and waved toward the cobblestoned area and the fountain. There were several buckets chained by the fountain and racks nearby where clothes were draped to dry.

  “Give me your shirt,” I told the Attolian, and filled the bucket in the reservoir below the bubbling fountain. I pushed his shirt and mine into water so cold it made the bones in my wrists ache. Scooping a bucket for himself, the Attolian dumped it over his head and then gasped.

  “Snowmelt,” I pointed out, too late.

  “Gods all around us, I am not sure I want to be clean this badly.” But he rubbed himself with the soap and then handed it to me to use on the shirts while he rinsed himself off, shuddering and swearing under his breath. Then he took over the scrubbing of the shirts while I did the same. Freezing cold and soaking wet, we both wrung out the shirts. As we spread them out on the racks to dry, we saw the tavern wife approaching with toweling for each of us. Shivering, we thanked her again and again and she laughed at our gratitude. She sent us to sit at the tables in front of the tavern and brought us each a bowl of stew from the hearth. We sat there in our toweling and ate, and I think it was the most restorative bath I have ever had in my life. I felt as if I could lift up and fly to the capital, like Immakuk and Ennikar in Anet’s Chariot, but the Attolian was more down to earth, and he was worried about money. He asked the tavern wife if there was anyone taking a wagon down to the coast in the next few days, someone who might let us ride along. She called a boy out of the tavern, obviously her son, and spoke a few quick words to him.

  The Attolian looked at me. “She sent him to the potter,” I said. “To see if he could use a young man with a strong back.”

  While we waited, we took stock. We had a blanket roll apiece, and the slavers’ spare clothes, odds and ends we had taken for camping, and their weapons. “We can sell my knife,” I pointed out. The longer knife was of no use to me. The Attolian had done all the cutting with his own knife, while mine had hung at my waist since I had taken it from the slavers. I pulled it out so that the Attolian could look it over.

  “It’s nothing fancy. I doubt anyone here would buy it,” he said. “We can probably sell it in the city, though, along with the bow and the arrows.”

  It turned out that the potter wasn’t going to the city, but he was delivering his pots to an estate partway there. He not only agreed to take us along, he promised us two hennat to load and then unload his wagon. From the estate, we could walk to the city in a day or two. The tavern wife gave us a generous measure of bread and cheese for one of the hennat. There would be no more hunting with the bow and no more caggi either. Any goats we saw would have owners who would strongly object to our shooting their farm animals, while smaller prey would have plenty of cover. We wanted to waste no time on snares. If we took a day or two to reach the city, we had enough money to feed us on the way. Once we got to the city, the Attolians would provide.

  We spent the night in the potter’s shed and loaded his wagon in the morning. I’d been thinking of wine jars for serving in a tavern, but these pots were huge, almost as high as I am tall, made to hold grain, not wine. The potter was an old man bent by the years at his wheel. He couldn’t have lifted a single pot, but he had an ingenious block and tackle to get them into the back of his cart. The Attolian’s strength just made everything easier. Once the pots were loaded, we climbed up ourselves and sat on top of them. We chatted with the potter while his mules carried us at a brisk pace, and we were unloading the pots that evening, halfway to the coast. We spent the night in a stable at the estate and started again in the morning.

  It was an easy walk. There was farmland on either side of the road and, in the distance, aqueducts bringing fresh water to the city. There were smaller ducts as well, carrying water to irrigate the fields and, in some places, to drive mills. All the
people of Zaboar seemed to be engineers putting the runoff from the Taymets to good use.

  Our waterskins were empty when we saw the mill, and it seemed reasonable to cross the drainage ditch by the road and approach the large stone building to ask for a drink and a chance to fill our skins. As we got closer to the mill and its sagging outbuildings, though, our steps slowed. The mill was in poor repair. The wheel wasn’t moving. The elevated wooden race leading to it was bone dry. There was a garden laid out inside a low stone wall, but its plants were dried and withered, and the mill yard was empty. There was a well, though, in the center of the yard. Or at least there was a worm-eaten wooden well cover lying on the ground with a square hole in the center.

  We caught a glimpse of children between the buildings, but a larger figure shooed them inside, and we heard a door close. Somewhere in a shed a dog, a large dog by the sound of it, began barking ferociously. I was ready to head back to the road, but the Attolian walked on toward the doorless entryway to the mill.

  Tiptoeing hesitantly up beside him, I heard voices inside. The Attolian looked pointedly at me, and I cleared my throat and called a greeting. The voices fell silent. The Attolian stepped into the darkness.

  Politely he called out, asking aid for travelers.

  Someone laughed harshly.

  My eyes had finally adjusted, and I made out five or six men leaning against the motionless mechanisms of the mill or sitting on the bags of grain. The mill smelled of mold and decay.

  “Gentlemen,” I said politely before my voice trailed off. These weren’t gentlemen.

  “The miller?” the Attolian asked. He bobbled the emphasis on the second syllable, but one of the burly men stood up.

  “This is my mill,” he said.

  “We hoped to fill our waterskins.”

  The men laughed again, looking at one another.

  The Attolian took a half step back and balanced his weight. He didn’t put his hand on his sword, though.

  “There is no water here,” said the miller. “The carrion picker uphill stole it.”