The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “What do you know about the rule of succession in Eddis?”

  “Well, they have a queen, like Attolia, so the throne can’t descend only in the male line. I suppose the rule is passed from parent to child, just like Sounis.”

  “And do you know if that has always been true?”

  Ambiades shrugged. “Since the invaders.”

  “And before?”

  “Are you talking about Hamiathes’s Gift?” Ambiades caught on quickly.

  “I am,” said the magus, and turned to Sophos. “Do you know about the Gift?” Sophos didn’t, so the magus explained.

  “It’s not surprising. Sounis and Attolia long ago converted to the invaders’ religion, and we worship those gods in the basilica in the city, but once we all worshiped the gods of the mountain country. There is an almost infinite pantheon with a deity for each spring and river, mountain and forest, but there is a higher court of more powerful gods ruled by Hephestia, goddess of fire and lightning. She governs all the gods except her mother, the Earth, and her father, the Sky.

  “The reign of Eddis supposedly arose out of one of the stories in which Hephestia rewarded a king named Hamiathes with a stone dipped in the water of immortality. The stone freed its bearer from death, but at the end of his natural life span the king passed the stone to his son and died. The son eventually passed it to his son, and the possession of it became synonymous with the right to rule the country. When a usurper stole the stone and soon thereafter died, it was understood that the power of the stone was lost unless it was given to the bearer, and so a tradition grew up that allowed the throne of Eddis to change hands peacefully when another country might have had a civil war. One person stole the stone and then gave it to his chosen candidate for the throne, in that way making him rightful king.”

  “But this is just myth,” protested Ambiades. I silently agreed with him.

  “It’s hard to say what is myth and what is real,” said the magus. “There may have been a king called Hamiathes, and he may have initiated this tradition. We do know that there was a stone called Hamiathes’s Gift and that at the time of the invaders people still believed in its power and its authority. So much so that the invaders attacked Eddis to gain control of the country by gaining control of the stone, which was additionally rumored to be some sort of fabulous gem. When the Gift disappeared, the invaders were thrown back off the mountain and returned their attention to Sounis and Attolia, which were more easily administered countries.”

  “What had happened to the stone?” asked Sophos.

  “It had been hidden by the king of Eddis, and he died without passing it to his son and without revealing its hiding place. It has remained hidden ever since.”

  “Do you think it could ever be found?” Sophos asked.

  The magus nodded. There was a short silence.

  “You think you can find it?” asked Ambiades, his face pinched with eagerness and probably greed, I thought.

  The magus nodded.

  “Do you mean,” I squawked, “that we are out here in the dark looking for something from a fairy tale?”

  The magus looked at me. I think he’d forgotten that I was there listening to him lecture his apprentices. “Reliable documents did survive from the time before the invaders, Gen. They mention the stone.”

  “And you really think you know where it is?” Ambiades persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?” he asked, while I shook my head in disbelief.

  “If it really exists, why,” I asked, “after hundreds of years are you the first one to locate it?”

  “I’m not.” The magus’s answer surprised me. “According to the records I’ve found, a number of other people have gone to look for the stone, but those who came closest to where I think it is hidden never came back. This makes me think that in one way at least they were poorly equipped.” He smiled benignly at me across the fire. “Traditionally it took an exceptionally talented thief to bring away the stone, and that’s why you’ve been invited to grace our party.”

  “Would those records you found be the ones you think survived since before the invaders?” Things that old I’d have to see before I believed in them.

  “Yes,” said the magus, hooking his linked hands over one knee and rocking back and forth in self-congratulation, “although they survive no more. Once I elicited the information I needed, they were destroyed to prevent anyone else from following the same trail.”

  I winced. It would have been better if the records hadn’t been discovered at all. Ambiades asked again where we were going.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” said his master.

  “And why are we going?” I asked derisively. “So that you can be king of Eddis? A hopelessly backward country full of woodcutters?” It was the most charitable description of Eddisians that I had heard in the city.

  “I will give the stone to Sounis of course. He will be king. I will be the King’s Thief.”

  This pricked my professional pride. I was going to do the stealing, and he was going to take the credit. His name would be carved in stone on a stele outside the basilica, and mine would be written in the dust. I reminded him that it was my place to be King’s Thief. “Or do you expect me to hand you Hamiathes’s Gift and then get knifed in the back? Is that why you brought Pol?”

  He didn’t rise to my bait, and Pol didn’t so much as shift his weight on the far side of the fire. A little chill ran up my spine.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the magus coolly. “No one would mistake you for anything but a tool, Gen. If a sword is well made, does the credit go to the blacksmith or to his hammer? How much smarter than a hammer can you be if you flaunt the proof of your crimes in a wineshop?” I flushed, and he laughed. If I hadn’t already been angry, it might not have seemed unkind laughter.

  “What would you do if you were King’s Thief, Gen? Chew with your mouth open in the royal presence? Chat with the court ladies, dropping the h’s at the beginning of your words and garbling the ends of most of them? Everything about you reveals your low birth. You’d never be comfortable at the court.”

  “I’d be famous.”

  “Oh, you’re that already, Gen,” he said pityingly.

  I’d have been amused myself if Ambiades’s snicker hadn’t rubbed me on the raw. I changed ground.

  “And Sounis trusts you to bring the stone back to him?”

  “Of course,” the magus snapped. I’d hit a sore point. He’d made sure that Sounis had to trust him, destroying all the records so that no one else could locate the stone.

  “Are you sure?” I needled him. “Maybe that’s why Pol is along. Maybe you’re the one to be knifed in the back.” His eyebrows flattened over his nose. He was angry at last.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said.

  “And why should Sounis be king of Eddis as well? He already has one country,” I said. “And all they have up there”—I waved to the mountain behind me—” is trees. A lot of trees. Does he want to build boats?”

  “No,” the magus explained, remembering that I was hardly worth being angry at, “he wants the queen.”

  I dropped my mouth open in patent disbelief. “We’re doing this so that he can get—”

  “—married,” said the magus. “Eddis has refused him so far, but she won’t be able to if he can show that he is the rightful ruler of her country. We’ve warned her that at his next proposal he will be the bearer of Hamiathes’s Gift.” And that’s why we were all out in the dark fetching what he had already promised to deliver.

  “What if no one believes in your silly Hamiathes’s Gift anymore?” I asked. “What if we find it and everyone says, ‘So what?’”

  “She is not so secure on her throne that she can risk offending her people’s gods. No woman could be.”

  I looked into the fire. For a while there was quiet around the campfire. “He doesn’t want the queen,” I said at last, the truth forcing its way out. “He doesn’t even want the count
ry. He wants the pass through the mountains so that he can invade Attolia.”

  Pol and Ambiades nodded their heads on the other side of the fire. To anyone who knew Sounis, this explanation made more sense than the one the magus offered.

  The magus shrugged. “It’s not important why he wants the Gift. What’s important is that we get it. And now I think you’d better get some rest.”

  Like a good tool, for instance, a very well-behaved hammer, I stretched out by the fire and went to sleep.

  The next morning light came slowly to the gorge, and I was well rested by the time our day started, but the conversation of the night before still rankled, and I took care to chew with my mouth open at breakfast until the magus winced and looked away. The gorge grew wider, and the olive trees disappeared. We walked past juniper and red shank and green shank bushes and the occasional fir tree as the stone cliffs were replaced by steep hillsides covered with loose rocks. Finally, in the evening, the gorge widened still further, and we were in a narrow valley filled with trees. The path underfoot changed from hard rock to dirt and then to dirt covered with pine needles. We made no sound as we climbed out of the valley into a larger forest that stretched indefinitely in front of us.

  “I told you there was nothing up here but trees,” I said as I turned around to look at the way we had come. I could see down the cut of the gorge until the trail twisted, and between the mountains I could see all the way out to the plains beyond. The road we had followed to the foothills was not visible, nor was the city, but we could see a bend of the Seperchia twisting across the plain, and beyond that there was a glimpse of the sea.

  “Can we stop now?” I wanted to know. “My feet are tired.”

  “No.” The magus shook his head. “Get moving.”

  Our trail continued between the trees. We made no sound as we walked and walked. I looked up at the branches that blocked any view of the sky overhead, mountain fir, with their cones beginning to open in order to drop their seeds. I said, “This is boring. How come boring makes me so tired?”

  When no one answered, I asked again, “When can we stop?”

  The magus slowed down to look over his shoulder. “Shut up.”

  “I just wanted—”

  Pol was behind me as usual. He leaned forward to give me a shove in the shoulder blades.

  It was almost dark when we came to a road through the forest paved with giant stones laid perfectly evenly. We waited under the trees until the magus was sure that the road was empty, and then we all sped across to the forest on the other side.

  “Where does the road go?” Ambiades asked the magus.

  “From Eddis’s capital city to the main pass through the mountains.”

  “How did they lay it?” Sophos wanted to know.

  The magus shrugged. “It’s been too long to know. It was laid at the same time as the old walls of our city. No one knows how it was done.”

  “Polyfemus,” said Ambiades.

  “What?” asked Sophos.

  “They probably think Polyfemus did it. He was the giant with one eye that supposedly built the old walls of the city and the king’s prison. Don’t you know any of these stories?”

  Sophos shook his head. “My father thinks that we should forget the old gods. He says that a country with two sets of gods is like a country with two kings. No one knows which to be loyal to.”

  The track continued on the far side of the stone road. We followed it into the trees until the sun set behind a bump of mountain. The twilight lasted while we set up a camp just off the trail and Pol made dinner on a small cookfire. The pine needles provided easy kindling.

  While we ate, I picked at the magus. I liked to watch him lose his temper and then regain it when he remembered that I was supposed to be beneath his contempt. When he and Pol tried to plan how to make up the day we had lost at the mountain house, I told him that if he had wanted to move faster, he should have had a cart for the early stage of the trip. Before I was done with my dinner, I asked for seconds and complained that he should have brought more food. I talked with my mouth full.

  “You don’t have to carry it,” Ambiades pointed out.

  “Yes,” said the magus. “Maybe we should have you carry your own share tomorrow?”

  “Oh, no, not me,” I said. “I’m worn out just hauling myself up here.” I lay down on my bedroll and wriggled on my backside until I could put my feet up on the trunk of a fallen tree. “Why didn’t you bring something more comfortable to sleep on?”

  The magus started to answer, but Sophos interrupted. He asked the magus to tell him more about the old gods of Eddis.

  “I thought your father didn’t want you to hear about them,” said Ambiades.

  Sophos thought for a minute. “I think he just doesn’t want people to believe in them, to have superstitions. I don’t think he objects to an academic interest.”

  “He doesn’t?” Ambiades laughed. “I thought an academic interest was exactly what he objected to. Didn’t he threaten to throw you into the river tied to a stack of encyclopedias?”

  Even Pol laughed as Sophos blushed. “He doesn’t think I should spend so much time on book learning, but he thinks it’s all right for other people.”

  There was a little silence at the fireside that I didn’t understand. To judge by the look on Ambiades’s face, whatever it was that bothered him had come upon him with a vengeance. To fill the silence, the magus told Sophos he would teach him some stories of the old gods. He began with the creation and the birth of the gods, and he didn’t do such a poor job. I lay on my back and listened.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EARTH’S CREATION AND

  THE BIRTH OF THE GODS

  Earth was alone. She had no companion. So she took a piece from the center of herself and made the sun and that was the first god. But in time he left Earth. He promised to always send her light during the day, but at night she was still alone. So she took a piece from the edge of herself and made the moon, and she was the first goddess. After a while the moon too went away from Earth. She promised to send her light to keep Earth company at night, but the moon’s promises are worth nothing, and she sent only part of her light and sometimes forgot entirely. When she forgot, there was no moonlight at all, and the Earth was lonely again.

  So she breathed out into the firmament, and she made the Sky. The Sky wrapped himself all around her and was her companion. He promised to stay with her always, and Earth was happy. Earth and the Sky’s first children were the mountain ranges, and Hephestia was the oldest. They had more children who were the great oceans and the middle sea, and their youngest children were the great rivers Seperchia and Skander.

  One day the Sky wanted to know what he looked like, so the Earth made a thousand goddesses and spread them all across the world to hold mirrors for the sky, and those are the lakes. The Sky looked at himself in the mirrors. He was blue and white with clouds and sometimes black and spangled with stars, and when the sun set, he was beautiful indeed. He grew vain. He looked at the Earth, who was round and colorless, and he felt superior.

  “I am quite beautiful,” he said to Earth, “but you are very dull. The only pretty things about you are your lakes.” And he spent all his time looking into the water and would not speak to Earth. So Earth swept up the dust from the mountains and made snow and the dust from the valleys and made dark black soil, and in the soil she scattered the seeds for forests and flowers and covered herself with green trees and bright colors and told the Sky that she was as beautiful as he. But he had eyes only for the lakes, who reflected his own glory. They bore him children, who were the smaller rivers and streams. Earth was jealous and made trees grow up around each of the lakes, hiding them from the Sky’s view.

  The Sky was angry. He took up some of the black soil from Earth’s valleys and some of the snow from her mountains, and he mixed them together and blew hard and scattered them across the world. Every speck of dust grew into a human, some dark like the valley soil and some white
as the snow. So, though we come from the Earth, we must thank the Sky for our creation, because it was the Sky that made man. But he was impatient and did not do such a job as the Earth would have done. Man came out small and weak and without the gifts of the gods. When the Sky sent men to clear the forest around the lakes, that he might see them, they were too weak to pull down the trees.

  Earth looked at them climbing through her forests and said, “Why have you made these?”

  And the Sky was ashamed, and he told her that he wanted to see the lakes, and the Earth was ashamed and said that she wanted the Sky to speak only to her. The Sky promised that he would look at the lakes only sometimes, and the Earth promised to hide only some of the lakes in the trees. And they were happy.

  But Earth watched the humans that the Sky had made and felt sorry for them. They were cold and hungry. So she gave them fire to make them warm, and she gave them seeds to scatter on the ground. She made animals for them to eat, but no matter what gifts she gave them the humans were ungrateful. They thanked only the Sky for having made them. The Earth grew angry and she shook with her anger, and the houses that the humans had built fell down and the animals that they had gathered were frightened and ran away, and the humans realized that they had made a terrible mistake. From then on there were always some humans who thanked the Earth for her gifts and some humans who thanked the Sky for their creation.

  When the magus was finished, the group of us sitting around the fire was quiet. Then Sophos asked, “The people in Eddis, do they really believe that?”

  I barked with laughter, and everyone looked at me. “In the city of Sounis do they really believe that the Nine Gods won the Earth in a battle with Giants? That the First God spawns godlets left and right and his wife is a shrew who is always outwitted?” I lifted the back of my head off the ground and crossed my arms underneath it. “No, they don’t believe that, Sophos. It’s just religion. They like to go up to the temple on feast days and pretend that there is some god who wants the worthless sacrificial bits of a cow, and people get to eat the rest. It’s just an excuse to kill a cow.”