Return of the Thief
Page 13
“Oh, all of them, by now,” said the king. “It’s been months. Even Melheret might know, though he may be out of touch out on his family’s farm.”
“He did quite well,” agreed the queen, moving to the cushioned chair beside him, wrapping her skirts around herself as she sat, “getting himself dismissed from court before something worse happened.” Eyes still on the king, she said, “We’d like something to eat.”
Lamion ducked his head and excused himself, leaving them alone except for me.
Attolia continued once he was gone. “You were right—he saw past the cheap setting of the earrings.”
“He’d seen those stones in your ears. He knew their value.” The king had gone back to his papers.
“Obviously no one else did, or he wouldn’t have made it home to his wife. You liked him.”
The king thought for a minute. “He wasn’t an ass, which is more than one can say for every other Mede ambassador we have met. I agree with you that he might yet prove useful.”
The queen nodded in agreement and added, perhaps thinking of the contrast her husband made to the Mede’s elegance, “My, how barbarian you look.” The king, who had overridden Ion’s disapproval earlier that day, appeared a little bit self-conscious about his attire. Ion had tried to talk him out of wearing the sleeveless leather tunic with no shirt underneath.
“I was hot,” he admitted. The recent days had been unseasonably warm. “I promise to put on my fancy clothes later.”
“We could move the court to the villa on Thegmis. It is cooler out of the city.” She relaxed into the chair, letting its high back and its arms hold her up, then reached with one delicate foot for the stool. I leaned from where I sat to move it into position for her. She smiled and I ducked shyly back into the corner between the king’s desk and the wall, reassured that she knew that I was there and did not object.
“I like it here,” said the king. They both knew being out on the island of Thegmis would limit his ability to roam Attolia’s capital city on his own.
The queen asked, “Why don’t you have tattoos?”
The king looked down at his arm, bare except for a heavy, figured silver band just above his elbow. “It’s very difficult to pass yourself off as an Attolian—or a Sounisian, for that matter—while decorated with Eddisian tattoos.”
“No need to pass yourself off as anything now. Except king,” she said meaningfully.
If that was bait, he didn’t rise to it. “If you are suggesting our contentious Eddisian guests might like me better with tattoos, you are mistaken. One gets them at specific times and for very specific reasons. The one that goes here,” he said as he raked the point of his hook lightly across the skin above the armband, “is inked when a boy enters the training house with the other boys his age. As my grandfather had spirited me away the night before, I joined a few months later, without the initiation ceremony and without a tattoo.”
“And the one higher on the shoulder?”
“That is to honor the first man an Eddisian kills.”
“And have you not killed a man?” she asked, knowing that he had.
He conceded those deaths with a tip of his head. “The tattoo is only for the first, and I didn’t get one at the time.”
She raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
“My grandfather didn’t have them either,” he said.
The queen knew that, and also knew he was changing ground. She was well aware of the fine line walked by Eddis’s Thieves. They were granted a great deal of leeway, and occasionally severely punished for taking too much of it. The absence of tattoos made them outsiders in their own communities, and that alienation was a deliberate check on their otherwise dangerous power. A Thief could threaten the throne of Eddis but never take it, could depose a king but never be one. The question of whether one could become annux—not king, but high king over the ruler of Eddis—was the one tearing the volatile, often violent, court of Eddis apart.
If she wondered whether there was another reason the king had not gotten a tattoo on his upper arm, if perhaps no one was supposed to know about the first man the Thief of Eddis had killed, Attolia let that question lie.
“I came to ask again about your attendants,” she said, as the door to the bedchamber reopened and Ion returned carrying a small table, Lamion following after with a cloth for it.
“Have they misbehaved?” Eugenides looked over his shoulder at Philologos coming in with a tray. Philo, still easily flustered, went wide-eyed and only barely stopped himself from shaking his head.
“About choosing two new companions at the Festival of Moira,” said the queen.
“And sending two home?” The king looked thoughtful. “Weren’t we supposed to be fostering goodwill with their families?”
“I think the palace budget would allow two more.”
“They’ll be stacked like kindling in their apartments.” They would. The attendants’ quarters were uncomfortable already. I had the space where I slept to myself because no one wanted to share a closet with me. I was quite content, but it was still a closet.
“If you will not change apartments, let us consider rotation again. They need not reside all the time with you.”
The king looked relieved. “Indeed, they need not. They can have some nice rooms on Thegmis.”
The queen continued on as if he had not spoken. “A new attendant from Eddis and one from Sounis to calm the waters.”
“Ah,” said the king. “You mean Cleon.”
“And Sophos has recommended Perminder of Nilos.”
“Sophos’s track record for picking companions is not the best,” the king pointed out.
Ion, standing behind him, looked pained.
“I meant Ion Nomenus,” said the king, his wounded innocence deeply insincere.
“So, we are agreed,” said the queen firmly. “You will invite them at the festival tonight.”
The king demurred. “It would be better to do it in private. Something to eat?” He waved at Philo’s tray.
Attolia made a face, not interested in the very food she had asked the attendants to bring. “Perhaps later.” She stood and straightened her skirts and kissed him lightly on the forehead before leaving.
Sounis and Eddis had come again for the Festival of Moira. The judges were more circumspect, and that year’s plays mocked safer targets. One of them was Relius: the lascivious character in the most popular play was obviously modeled on the former secretary of the archives. Another target was the former ambassador of the Mede. His character needed no pseudonym. The plays were amusing, but all the talk was still about Cenna’s play from the year before. Foolish Emipopolitus’s fearmongering was at the forefront of every conversation, right up until the moment the king officially invited Perminder and Cleon of Eddis to join him as attendants.
“That was a misstep,” said the queen of Attolia to the queen of Eddis, after the banquet was over. They had retired together to discuss Cleon’s outrageous behavior.
Eddis pulled the delicate silver crown from her head and ran her fingers through her hair, picking up small gold flecks on her hands as she did so. She began wiping them off on her skirts and then stopped, seeing that this was a poor solution to the problem. One of Attolia’s attendants brought a cloth, and Eddis took it with a smile.
Ruefully she said, “I was sure Cleon would be unable to resist the chance to swan about as an attendant. He longs for respect and is just smart enough to know he’ll never get it in Eddis.”
Perminder, when invited to join the attendants to the king of Attolia, had stood and made a very pretty speech thanking him. Cleon had not only refused the invitation; he’d thrown it back in the king’s face. “Since when does a Thief need attendants?” he had asked. “Perhaps to carry the crown you’ve stolen to the altar of your god?”
Eddis said, “If I take him home now, he’ll have the old men thumping him on the back and praising him to the high heavens. They are as stubborn as goats,” she complained.
> “You could send them to colonize the moon,” Attolia suggested.
Eddis laughed briefly. “It would be easier! They’d rather leap into the Sacred Mountain than accept Gen as high king. If only he would not needle them,” she said plaintively. “He burns through the last vestiges of any goodwill.”
“If he were more kinglike,” Attolia responded, “we both know he wouldn’t be king.”
“But he distances himself . . . with his fancy clothes and his Attolian accent.”
“He distances himself from you,” said Attolia, “so that you are still queen.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know that.”
Eddis threw up her hands, was surprised by the towel, which she’d forgotten she held. “Cleon’s too stupid to come up with the things he says. Now that he has said them, though, he is the one I must get out of my court.”
“There are a number of ways to accomplish that,” Attolia said, not for the first time.
Not for the first time, Eddis refused. “If I silence him with too heavy a hand, there are others who will clamor even louder. He is a thorn to be drawn out very carefully, which is why I’d so hoped to foist him off on Gen.” She sighed. “Gen can only put up with so much.”
Attolia agreed. “He will do something outrageous if he is pushed too far,” she said, and added, “I know you know that, too.”
“Well, I will not beg for Cleon again,” Eddis said as she handed the towel back to Chloe. “He will apologize on his knees tomorrow, and if Gen cannot stomach him, maybe I will pitch him into the Sacred Mountain myself.”
When a messenger on a lathered horse comes to the city, he draws the eye of every person in the road. They see his direction. As he turns up the streets toward the palace, Rumor, who is born in a moment, is full-grown the next. She begins to move through the town, trailing ever more elaborate finery behind her.
Costis would have reached the palace sooner if he had come by way of the headland above the city. It would have been harder on the mare, though, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to force her up the steeper path. Still, he urged her to her best pace, her hooves rattling on the stones. When he reached the lower gates of the palace, he was already dismounting as she shuddered to a halt.
The guard on duty recognized him and waved him in.
“Take good—” he started to say over his shoulder.
“We will,” said a stable hand, leading the mare away.
As Costis continued on foot, Rumor outpaced him. A girl in the herb garden cutting rosemary heard the stable hand talking as he brought in the exhausted horse. She stepped to the kitchens, eager to be the first to tell her friends—and the errand boys who overheard her—that something out of the ordinary was happening. In the hallways, people saw a stranger, dirty and tired, out of place in the palace, or they saw the guard who had brought the slave Kamet out from the heart of the empire. They followed to see what more they could learn, or they dropped whatever errand they were on and began another—spreading the news of Costis’s return.
Relius slipped into the reception room where the high king was sitting with Attolia on one side of him and Sounis and Eddis on the other, listening to Cleon’s reluctant apology. The king’s absence of interest in the proceeding was apparent and vast. It was he who was the first to notice Relius, and when Orutus, the new secretary of the archives, came in next, very red in the face, the king sat up straight. Heads turned.
Behind Orutus was General Piloxides and, behind him, Casartus, admiral of the navy. By the time the door opened to let Attolia’s minister of war, Pegistus, in, there were people gathering in the hallway, peering through the doors until they closed again, and Cleon, interrupted in midspeech, was swiveling his head in bewilderment. Relius politely but relentlessly shuffled him out of the way. Orutus stood back, glowering as Relius bowed and said, “Costis brings news.”
Ghasnuvidas, emperor of the Mede, had lost his ships. With no means to transport his men across the Middle Sea, he’d marched them around it instead. With much of his navy destroyed in the straits of Hemsha, he’d sent his entire army north from Kodester into Zaboar. The oligarch of Zaboar had not only allowed them entry, he had closed his harbors, trapping rumormongers inside the city walls. When the Mede forces were shuttled across the Shallow Sea in flotillas of small boats, they landed up and down the coast of Kimmer, and Kimmer too had been silent.
Unopposed, the various companies had moved separately, not uniting until they reached the empty backlands of Roa. Only when commissioners were sent ahead to arrange for markets to be set up along their route did word begin to spread of their advance.
The army passed small villages and then larger ones, marching toward roads wide enough to let them move more quickly. They bought up carts and horses, as many as they were offered, and paid in coin for them. Farmers who brought their produce to the temporary markets told their friends and neighbors that the rumors were true, there was money to be made. The army of Ghasnuvidas wasn’t looting its way through Roa any more than it had through Kimmer. Its passage had been arranged in advance.
Like any prophet warning of calamity, Costis, travel worn and exhausted, was met with disbelief.
“Did you see the army with your own eyes?” Piloxides demanded.
“No,” Costis admitted. “When Kamet heard rumors, I rode east until I saw the farmers’ supply wagons, then I turned and rode here as quickly as I could.”
“Then this is just rumor,” Piloxides growled.
“And we’ve heard nothing from Kimmer or Roa,” said Pegistus.
Orutus said, “If an army had crossed at Sukir, our trade houses would have sent word.”
The door opened and closed behind him, as Eddis’s minister of war and Sounis’s magus arrived. It had taken Relius’s messengers longer to find them.
Puzzled, the magus looked to his king. “Ghasnuvidas sends his army overland,” said Sounis.
“Zaboar,” said the magus heavily, and Relius nodded.
“They couldn’t have crossed from Zaboar,” said Orutus. “There are no troop ships there to move them—”
“The Shallow Sea is full of ships to move them.”
“There’s been plague! No one would march an army into a city with plague! We’ve heard of it for months.”
“Heard from whom?” asked Attolia.
The master of spies dropped his eyes. He admitted, “Our sources may be unreliable.”
“My traders?” Attolia bristled at the possibility of betrayal.
“No, Your Majesty. The trade houses have sent no reports at all.” Grudgingly, Orutus turned to Relius. “Have you heard?”
Relius shook his head. “Not I. I run no spies for my queen.”
“Then all we have is this rumor,” said Casartus, getting back to the point.
“It is no rumor,” Costis said firmly.
“How can you be sure?” asked Eddis’s minister of war, not dismissing Costis’s report, only checking his reasoning.
Exhausted, Costis explained again. “The Mede commissioners are buying up every cow, every pig, every goat, every sack of grain for their commissaries, and they are paying with coin, not promises. If there’s not a huge army, then I don’t know what they are feeding in Roa.”
“Then why didn’t you go on until you’d seen it yourself?” Casartus wailed in frustration.
Costis flicked a glance at Relius. “We were not sure a message would get through if I did not bring it.”
Attolia looked to Relius as well.
“My messenger is late,” he said.
“You said you ran no spies,” the new secretary of the archives said bitterly.
Relius delicately shrugged. “A messenger is not a spy, secretary.”
“You and Kamet were in the capital city?” Orutus turned on Costis.
“No,” said Costis, “we were—” He swallowed the words he had been about to say. “Nearer the coast,” he finished more cautiously. Orutus was livid.
“Kamet said to expect seventy thousand.” Costis knew no one would believe him, and Casartus wasn’t the only one who threw up his hands.
“Seventy thousand?” said the magus, stunned.
“That is ridiculous!” said Casartus. “All of this—is ridiculous.”
“It’s impossible,” said Piloxides. “How could they field an army that size?”
“By having more wealth than we can possibly imagine,” the king told him.
“There is no way they could march an army that size through Roa without Roa knowing!” Piloxides argued.
“No, they couldn’t,” the king agreed. “Our allies have betrayed us, Piloxides.”
Not since Nussam led his forces across the isthmus to conquer the Sidosian empire had the world seen an army that size. I tried to imagine seventy thousand men marching together like a city on the move. What road could it travel? The head of the army might be in one town while the tail was in an entirely different one. And how would they make camp at night? If all the soldiers lay down to sleep side by side, how much ground would they cover? If, like my father, every soldier came with servants to accompany him, were there only a fifth as many soldiers in an army of seventy thousand, or were there seventy thousand fighting men and an army of even more? Did they bring medics, advisors, cooks? How much food would they eat? How much grain would be needed every day to feed a man, a horse, an ox? Distracted by the wealth of numbers, I let most of what was said next pass over my head.
Most scholars now agree on the number fifty thousand for the fighting men of the Mede army. At one helpmeet for every three men—a cautious estimate—there would be sixteen thousand supporters. Bu-seneth, the general in charge of the army, had forbidden the use of any carts until they reached the cultivated land of Roa. That was how he had moved a city’s worth of men so quickly. By the time they’d reached the king of Roa’s highways, the Medes had bought up more than six thousand horses and five thousand or more mules and donkeys and oxen.