As every pane of glass broke into a hundred pieces that filled the air and dropped and shattered again on the stone floor, Eugenides threw himself to the floor, covering his head with his arms. Glass pattered down over him. He lay and listened as the glass slid across stone, the fragments rubbing against each other in quiet music. The wind stopped, and the sound of the moving glass faded, but the pressure in the room grew. He could feel it against his eardrums. He was terrified. Not frightened as he had been in the past, but panicked like an animal caught in a trap or a man whose solid world shifts under his feet in an earthquake. He’d been in earthquakes before, in the mountains. He took a deep breath.
“You betrayed me,” he shouted, his voice muffled by his arms. He remembered the Mede who had appeared on the mountainside without any explanation. “Twice,” he wailed. “You betrayed me twice. What are the Medes, that you support them? Am I not your supplicant? Have I not sacrificed at your altars all my life?”
“And believed in us all your life?” a voice asked, a voice that was a variation in the pressure in his ears. Eugenides shuddered at the gentleness. No, he hadn’t believed. Most of the sacrifices had been for form’s sake, a meaningless ritual to him at the time.
“Have I offended the gods?” he asked in despair before rage burned the despair away. “And if I have offended the gods,” he yelled, almost unable to hear his own words, “then why didn’t I fall? It is the curse of thieves and their right to fall to their deaths, not—not—” He folded his arms across his chest, tucking the crippled one under and curling over it, unable to go on.
“Who are you to speak of rights to the gods?” the voice asked, gentle still.
The room was dark around Eugenides, and the darkness pressed him until he couldn’t breathe, until he was aware of nothing but the pressure. He was nothing, the smallest particle of dust surrounded by a myriad of other particles of dust, and put all together, they were…nothing but dust. Alone, separated from the others, in the eye of the gods he may have been, but he remained, still, dust. He struggled to inhale and whispered, “Have I offended the gods?”
“No,” said the voice.
“Then why?” he sobbed, clutching his arm tighter, though the blisters under the cuff were individual pains as sharp as knives. “Why?”
In the darkness behind his closed eyelids, Eugenides saw red fire flicker. When it was gone, the darkness afterward was a vision of a night with stars in the sky and a black silhouette that was the Sacred Mountain in Eddis. There was a gray plume of smoke, lighter than the surrounding blackness. The plume of smoke lightened, and the stars faded as the day dawned. Then, without warning, the top of the mountain exploded and the fire returned, flashing on the undersides of a cloud of ash and smoke wider than the mountain, wider than all the valleys of Eddis. Eugenides watched as boiling rock swept down the remains of the mountain, filling the valleys with smoking ruin. He saw the houses of the city exploding one after another and the people running, a woman with a little child suddenly engulfed in flame. The ground shuddered under his feet. The red, heaving wall of melted rock bore down on him, and he couldn’t move. His skin grew warm and then hot until it felt as dry as paper and as ready to burn. He could smell the hair of his eyebrows singeing, and he still couldn’t move. He squeezed his eyes shut, but they were shut already, and the vision remained as clear. He threw himself backward and could feel the broken glass around him cutting into his skin. But he was still on his stomach and no farther from the intense heat. The magma rolled closer. He screamed and screamed again.
On her throne Attolia sat and waited. The room was empty, and the silence echoed. All night the clouds had gathered above the palace, and the thunder had rumbled. After many hours she rose and left the throne room, collecting the inevitable retinue of servants and courtiers as she left the palace and rode to the temple of the new gods. The priests must have been warned of her coming. They met her in the pronaos and stood silently by while she wandered through the temple to the altar. She lifted the heavy gold candlesticks and carefully replaced them. She tilted the ceremonial offering bowl and listened to the musical jingle of the gold and silver disks carved with praise and supplications as they slid across the metal bottom of the bowl. She walked again the length of the temple. It was cold and empty. Perhaps the invaders’ gods had left with the invaders. She didn’t know. She knew only that the room was empty, as empty as her throne room, to which she returned. She sent her court away and her servants to bed and settled herself on the throne. When everything was still, she bowed her head and spoke to the darkness.
“Give him back to me,” she said, “and I will build your altar at the highest point of the city’s acropolis and around it build a temple in which you will be honored so long as Attolia remains.” There was no answer. She sat and waited.
“Eugenides.” A voice as gentle as rain and as cool as water called his name, and he ceased his screaming to listen. “Nothing mortals make lasts; nothing the gods make endures forever. Do you understand?”
“No,” said Eugenides hoarsely. Slowly the vision of the Sacred Mountain faded. He was still on his stomach on the floor of the solarium. He sensed the solid stone walls all around him.
“Do you know me?” the new voice asked.
“No,” Eugenides whispered.
“You sacrificed once at my altar.”
“Forgive me, goddess. I do not know you.” Beyond his conviction that it was a goddess who spoke, he could make no guess at her identity. He wasn’t sure if she meant that he had sacrificed to her years ago and stopped or that it was only once that he had made a sacrifice in her honor. He could only wonder how many different gods he had sacrificed to just once. All his life he had left sacrifices in passing at various tiny temples and altars in his own country and in Sounis and Attolia as well: a coin, or a piece of fruit, a handful of olives, a piece of jewelry he’d previously stolen and didn’t care to keep. Lately he’d been more thoughtful in his sacrifices, but he still didn’t remember most of them, only that he was careful to offer at whatever temples and altars of water immortals he encountered, hoping to make up for any lingering disfavor on the part of Aracthus. He’d made a particularly nice sacrifice at the altar of Aracthus before he’d stepped into the chasm of his watercourse, but that hadn’t been his first sacrifice to the river, and anyway, it was a goddess who spoke. A goddess to whom he clearly should have paid greater attention.
“You are thinking as I stand between you and the Great Goddess that perhaps you have dedicated your sacrifices all these years in error?” Her voice was amused.
Eugenides said nothing.
“Do not offend one power to attain the favor of another. The Thief is your god, but remember, no god is all-powerful, not even the Great Goddess.”
She was silent then, long enough for Eugenides to wonder if she was gone and if he dared raise his head and if what had happened was all that would happen. Finally she spoke again.
“Little Thief,” she said, “what would you give to have your hand back?”
Eugenides almost lifted his head.
“Oh, no,” said the goddess. “It is beyond my power and that of the Great Goddess as well. What’s done is done, even with the gods. But if the hand could be restored, what would you give? Your eyesight?” The voice paused, and Eugenides remembered begging Galen, the physician, to let him die before he was blind. “Your freedom?” The goddess went on. “Your sanity? Think, Eugenides, before you question the gods. You have much still to lose.”
Softly Eugenides asked, “Why did my gods betray me?”
“Have they?” asked the goddess as softly.
“To Attolia, to the Mede…” Eugenides stuttered.
“Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?”
Eugenides’s eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight.
“You have your answer, Little Thief.” And she w
as gone.
Eugenides slept and woke again in the dark. He was on his back, he realized. He was in bed. There was no fire in the hearth, but it was a clear night, and there was enough light to see Eddis sitting in a chair nearby.
He cleared his throat. “The mountain,” he said. “I saw the mountain explode.”
“I know,” said Eddis.
“You’ve seen it?” asked Eugenides.
“In my dreams since midwinter.”
Eugenides moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as if trying to shake the memories away. “Once was awful enough for me. When do you think?”
“Not soon,” said Eddis, leaning toward him to rest a hand on his forehead. “Someday, but perhaps not in our lifetime. Hephestia has warned us, so there will be time to prepare.” She reassured him, and he slept again.
When he next woke, it was day, and the room was filled with light. He turned to see if Eddis was still beside him and found Attolia, patiently waiting for him to open his eyes. She was sitting with her hands folded, staring into the distance, but she must have seen his movement because she shifted to meet his gaze.
“Do you love me?” Eugenides asked without preamble.
“Why do you ask?” she answered, and he grimaced in frustration.
“Because I need to know,” he said.
“I am wearing your earrings,” Attolia offered.
“Being willing to marry me is not the same as loving me.”
“Would you believe me if I said I did love you?” Attolia asked. It seemed a genuine question, and Eugenides thought carefully about his answer.
“I don’t think you’d lie.”
“Does it matter?” Attolia asked.
“If you are truthful?”
“If I love you,” she said.
“Yes. Do you love me?” he asked again.
She didn’t answer. “When we opened the doors to the solarium three days ago—”
“Three days?” Eugenides queried.
“Three days,” Attolia confirmed. “When we opened the doors, we saw that the entire room was scorched black and you were on the floor possibly dead, surrounded by broken glass. Window glass is expensive, you realize that?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he said meekly.
“You might have been dead, but you weren’t. Not cut to pieces, not burned to a cinder, and when you woke, your queen reported that you didn’t seem to be insane. Are you insane?”
“No more than usual, I think.”
“Insane to think of loving me,” said Attolia, and the emotions that colored her usually emotionless voice were bitterness and self-mockery.
Eugenides reached to take her hand, but she was sitting at his right side and he had to reach across his body. He raised himself on his elbow, but she freed her hand and pushed him gently back into the bed. Then she pulled the covers back to expose the stump of his right arm. His cuff and hook, he saw, were laid on a table across the room. He resisted the temptation to pull the arm back under the covers.
“It is not so sore,” she said.
“No.” Eugenides ran his hand over his arm. The ridges of calluses and the blisters were gone. He was free of the ache in his bones and the pain in his phantom hand. He thought of the goddess who had interceded on his behalf and thought the pain might be gone forever.
Looking at his arm, Attolia said, “I cut off your hand.”
“Yes.”
“I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don’t think—I don’t think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn’t recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you—my lip service to other gods, but my pride, too, and my rage at all gods, everything for you. Then I see you here, and see what I have done to you.” Gently she stroked his maimed arm, and he shivered at the warmth of her touch and its intimacy.
“You have spied on me for years?” she asked.
“Yes,” Eugenides admitted.
“Watched me deal with my barons and my servants, loyalists, traitors, and enemies?” She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn’t know how to nurture it or if it could live.
Unable to guess the answer, she asked, “Who am I, that you should love me?”
“You are My Queen,” said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth.
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
And she believed him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The landscape of Attolia and Sounis and even Eddis is much like the landscape that surrounds the Mediterranean Sea. I have taken bits and pieces of the region and history and fitted them into my story, but the story is fiction. Nothing in it is historically accurate. The gods and the goddesses in my book are not those of the Greek or any other Pantheon. I made them up. The Mede Empire is also my own invention.
In the real world, many empires have risen and fallen while attempting to surround and control the Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Myceneans were some of the earliest. The Persians, in the fifth century B.C., tried to extend their empire to the Greek Peninsula and failed twice. They were defeated at the battle of Marathon and then at the battle of Salamis. The Romans managed to hold the Mediterranean for five hundred years and in the process exported their gods and insisted they replace at least officially the gods native to different parts of their empire.
After the Romans came the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic states, the trade empires of Italian city-states, and the Ottoman Empire, which did not disappear until the twentieth century, when the powerful nations of the European continent contrived to defeat and divide it.
About the Author
Megan Whalen Turner is the author of INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES, THE THIEF, which was awarded a Newbery Honor, and its sequels, THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA and THE KING OF ATTOLIA. She lives in Ohio.
You can visit her online at http://home.att.net/~mwturner.
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Also by
MEGAN WHALEN TURNER
The Thief
The King of Attolia
Instead of Three Wishes
Credits
Cover art © 2006 by Vince Natale
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
Copyright
THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA. Copyright © 2000 by Megan Whalen Turner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196846-4
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Books by Megan Whalen Turner
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Queen of Attolia Page 26