The king stopped his horse beside an outcropping like a rocky shoulder sticking out of the hillside. The trail disappeared around it and then reappeared on a slope some distance away, switchbacking upward to a notch in the knife edge of the mountain above us.
“We are close enough now,” said the king. “You can see the way from here. Pheris and I will wait for reinforcements from the queens.”
The minister of war nodded stern approval. He leaned to embrace his son, then he bowed his head to his high king and led the way forward. Ion hesitated, but the king waved him on. Dionis and Motis followed. My bearer deposited me back on Snap, and the man who had been leading her handed me back the reins. I sat on my pony, feeling weak and cheated as everyone else rode to glory, not really understanding that most of them were riding to their deaths. The last man had passed around a curve in the trail and the sound of horse hooves on rock was fading when I looked at the king, wondering how he could have given up his chance and mine to fight against the Medes.
He said, “This is no time to argue with my father.” Then he pointed over my shoulder to the much fainter track behind me.
We turned our horses and began to climb. The ascent was much steeper at first than the route the minister of war had taken, and the horses had to scramble to get up it. Once they had, we could see that, like the other route, our path climbed all the way to the skyline. We watched as the minister of war reached it and passed through. Then we rode up after him.
Up close, the Naupent was a passage between sheer rock walls, so narrow I could have reached from Snap’s back and touched them on either side. On the other side of it, we discovered the remains of the Attolian guard. Their bodies were scattered among those of the Mede advance party that the minister of war had killed in turn.
The open ground below the Naupent on the seaward side was cupped like a shallow bowl, tilted as if to spill its contents down the hill. There was even a trickle of a stream that pooled just before the lip of it, like a libation waiting to be poured out. Beyond that, the ground dropped too steeply to be seen from where we sat. Farther away, though, we could make out the route down to the Gulf and coming up it, their weapons shining in the sun, the Mede.
The Minister of War had ordered his men into formation on either side of the narrow streamlet. He looked over his shoulder as the king rode down to join them.
“I lied,” said the king.
“I know,” said his father. He pointed to the space he’d left open and the king moved into position.
Chapter Twelve
The sun was rising as the queen of Attolia rode into the narrow passage of the Naupent, the hoofbeats of horses echoing behind her like ragged heartbeats. The mist ahead of her, held at the very threshold of the pass by the warm dry air inland, might have been a solid wall of gray stone. Crossing into it, Attolia found herself alone in a ghostly pale world as the ground underfoot went from gravel to grass and the hoofbeats behind her slowly faded.
She was listening with all her heart, but the only thing she could make out was the squeak of leather tack from the riders she’d brought with her. She sensed their presence on either side but could no longer see them.
“Your Majesty,” someone on her left called quietly. It was Teleus, and she knew he’d found the first of the dead. She turned her horse in his direction.
Some of the bodies were laid in an orderly row; the others were scattered as if, by the time they had fallen, there had been no one to help them off the field. There was still silence as all ears listened for the slightest sound, a call for help, even a moan. The mist, catching the sun, was dissolving, revealing more and more bodies as it faded away, Attolian, Eddisian, and Mede.
Attolia and Eddis had been successful beyond all expectation. They had beaten back the Medes, forcing their enemy to retreat into the narrow gorge of the Leonyla, pushing them beyond the defensive walls built centuries earlier to narrow the already narrow passage. The Peninsula held those walls now, the gates of the Leonyla, and they could hold them indefinitely so long as they did not falter. The Peninsula had the advantage, and the advantage must not be wasted in grieving. Even for the death of the king.
Attolia had guessed what she would find and had made Eddis stay behind. They knew the pass had been held, because the Medes had not come through it. They also knew it had been held at terrible cost, because none of those who had gone to defend it had returned. No messenger even to tell the fate of the defenders, most of them Eddis’s uncles and cousins, her high king, her Thief.
Attolia, her voice firmly under control, said, “Gather in our dead. Leave the enemy where they lie.”
“There is no fuel for a pyre,” said Teleus beside her.
“We will carry the dead through the Naupent and down to the fields of the Leonyla. They will have their due—their rites and their pyres—with our other fallen.” A pyre that burns seven days for a high king, she thought.
The mist was receding faster, as if the horses coming through the pass had opened the way for the warm air, and it was flowing into the valley in a rush. So many bodies, lying tangled together, piled one on top of another, covering the ground. And still not a sound from anywhere around them.
“Only sleeping,” Attolia said aloud.
“My queen?” Teleus thought he had misheard.
She swung down from her horse, landing heavily, catching the captain for balance. “They are sleeping, Teleus. We must wake them.”
“My queen,” Teleus said again, afraid for her as she moved from man to man, crouching over them, shaking them, saying, “Wake up, wake up.”
He went after her. He hesitated, then he placed his hands on her shoulders. “My queen.” He had no other words, and only the warmth of his touch in the chill morning air to offer. His voice penetrated my darkness, and slowly I opened my eyes to find myself lying in the wet grass where I had collapsed.
The day before, the minister of war had watched in amusement as the king tried to send me away from the battle line and I’d stubbornly refused to go. When the king turned to him for help, though, the minister had accomplished easily what the king could not. “There will be a pool under the laurels,” he’d said, pointing to where the twisted mountain trees grew along the stream bed. “Collect every bottle and sack the men have and fill them there. Be ready when we call for water.” When I still hesitated, the look he gave me was so stern, Snap was carrying me away before I knew I’d given in.
“Thank you,” I heard the king say behind me.
“He should live to tell the tale,” said his father. “Gods willing he will not fill it with nonsense for our great-grandchildren to read.”
So I had helped the wounded back from the fighting, offering those who wanted water a sip and doing what I could to ease their passing. Then, as the Medes continued to flow into the shallow cup of the battlefield, over the lip of it like a libation running in reverse, rising against us in an endless tide, I had used my little knife, staggered and stabbed, striking at knees and thighs, certain I was going to die, only I had not.
As the sun had dropped and the shadow of the ridge reached out over us, the flow of the enemy had slowed then begun to recede. Their cause lost, the Medes had withdrawn, taking the path back down to the sea, descending into the mist as it rose to greet them, leaving those of us still alive to sink to the ground, too exhausted even to call out to one another as the mist covered us as well, not with cold and damp, but with darkness.
Now I rolled over and the horse nearest me danced away in surprise.
I was still blinking when Attolia stepped to my side and sank to the ground, too ungainly to bend down. She took my face quite gently in her hands and brushed my hair back from my face. “The king, Pheris. Does he live?”
I’d seen him toward the end of the battle, but he had stumbled away from me, into the mist.
Attolia turned to Teleus. “Look for the living,” she said. “Gather in the dead. I will look for the king.”
Pulling her robes a li
ttle higher, she picked her way across the slope of the battlefield, and I staggered after her. It was a miracle I could move at all. At first I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, but as I woke a little more, I stared into the faces of the dead as I passed. They were transformed, their skin as pale and hard as stone, their blood black, and the dew gathered on their hair and their eyelashes anointed them like sacred oil. They were easy to distinguish even in death by their uniforms or by the cloth bands on their arms. I looked at the foreign army and thought they too must be men of many different places, but I could not read the language of their faces and uniforms. In death, they were anonymous.
When we found the king, he lay unmoving, his face in the curve of his arm. He’d been alive, I was certain, at the end of the day, but he was as still as the dead when the queen dropped beside him, calling his name.
On the ground next to the king lay the minister of war, each drop of condensation on his lifeless face glinting like a diamond in the strengthening light of the day. As I watched, the king woke and saw his father and remembered that his father was dead.
As he sat up, Attolia circled the king with her arms. He laid his head on her shoulder and drew his hand very gently around her. Wordless, the queen stared at the bodies scattered over the grass as if wondering where to begin grieving. When her eyes narrowed, I knew she’d seen Nahuseresh’s body. It was not far away.
“Did your father kill him?” Attolia asked, catching at one small detail in the maelstrom of grief.
“The poets can say so,” said the king, his voice hoarse from shouting and from weeping. “My father fell early in the day, and Nahuseresh was alive much later than that. I have no idea who killed him.” His voice roughened further as the tears still to be shed began to rise. “I saw my father fall. I was too far away.”
Leaving them to their grief, I picked my way back uphill.
Men moved from body to body, checking each for signs of life. The wounded who had slept through the night, dreaming dreams they would remember for the rest of their lives, slowly blinked awake when they were shaken. Each as he was found was brought up and laid with the other wounded to be cared for as best as we could manage. Our men had brought mules packed with blankets and bandaging. Once they had found all the living, they began to bring up the dead and laid them in their orderly rows as well. Few had survived, but all those who’d made it through the day had lived through the night.
In time, the king and queen made their way back up the slope. I was just sitting, growing stiffer by the minute, not even trying to make myself useful. Though I was not physically injured, I was much damaged in spirit. The swelling pain of my abused back and my leg seemed somehow a proper balance to the pain in my heart. I had found Ion, and he lived. Motis was dead. Dionis badly wounded. He held out his hand to me when he saw me, and I knelt beside him to take it. He was deathly pale but assured me he would live. I did not believe him.
I overheard the king talking and caught the name of my uncle. I had not seen Sejanus, living or dead, that morning, and I pricked up my ears. The king said he wanted him found if he still lived. I staggered to my feet, stretched my aching leg, and went to look for him.
I looked first among the wounded, as it was faster than looking through the dead, and if he was dead, then he was beyond aid or worry. I found him carrying water. I bent near him where he crouched over a soldier, holding his flask and letting the water drop a bit at a time into the man’s mouth.
I tapped his shoulder. The king is asking for you.
“What does he say?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
I don’t know, only that he asks if you live still.
Rising to his feet, Sejanus handed me the waterskin. Then he headed up through the last strands of mist, toward the pass, without waiting to discover if the king saw him as a savior or a traitor.
I took his flask and continued from one injured man to the next, offering each a drink. I was there, the flask dangling from my hand, when they brought Sejanus back down from the pass, holding him tight by the arms.
As the pyres for our dead burned, the Mede retreated farther. Those among them who most feared their emperor’s displeasure had paid the ultimate price for their failure, and the rest were going home.
I had failed my king. Sejanus was under arrest again and the king, wild with grief, was determined to learn what would destroy him. Nothing I’d done had made a difference, and nothing I had done could have. If Sejanus had escaped entirely, if I had pushed my uncle to his death, if he’d died at the Naupent, the king would still have been determined to learn, at any cost, who had participated in Erondites’s conspiracy, who among his subjects had worked to slow our advance to the Leonyla.
Eddis tried to talk him out of his obsession. “You can’t do this.”
“I can do anything I want!” he snapped.
“Gen!” she said, very close to losing her own temper, as she too was overwhelmed with grief. She continued more quietly. “You forget that you are not the only one your grandfather taught that lesson. Unlike all the other people who hear you”—she waved expansively at the camp full of people around them—“I know the rest of what he said: if you are queen, you can do anything you want—but never everything you want. He said to choose wisely. Gen, this single-minded pursuit of yours, I cannot tell you what catastrophe might come of it; I can only tell you it is unwise. You are king—”
“Am I?” the king interrupted airily. “I do not seem to be. If I were king, my orders would be obeyed.”
With the Medes retreating, he had insisted that Attolia, heavily pregnant, should return to the safety of the capital. She’d refused to do so. He had commanded and she still had refused. He had stopped short of ordering Teleus to take the queen against her will. That Teleus wouldn’t have obeyed the order perhaps was all that stopped the king from giving it.
Eddis had had enough. She bowed her head. “You are king of kings,” she said, “and king of fools if you think you can give orders to your wife and expect her to obey.”
The pyre for the king’s father burned for three days. As its ashes cooled, the king summoned Sejanus. The walls around the council tent again were lifted and the tents on all sides had been struck to allow room for the crowd to gather. Again the fur-draped chairs were lined up, and again Sejanus was brought in chains before the rulers of the Lesser Peninsula. The high king had not slept for days, and his face was hollowed out with exhaustion, his eyes rimmed in red.
“I came to warn you,” my uncle protested.
“You knew the Medes were there because you conspired with your father. Again, Sejanus, you change sides to save yourself.”
“I—”
“You escaped and could have gone anywhere, yet you went to the Naupent. Why?”
“I didn’t go to the Naupent,” Sejanus insisted. He was hell-bent on telling the truth, though he knew he would not be believed. “I went in the opposite direction, but there was a woman in the woods. She said that if I turned around, I would meet a man with a message for me, so I did. I found one of the sentries from the pass, badly wounded. He had taken the wrong path down from the pass. When he asked me to carry the warning to you, I said I would.”
“You met a woman in the woods?” said the king in disbelief. “Who was this mystery woman?”
“She appeared to be my childhood nurse, Melisande.” Sejanus shrugged. The king hesitated, almost as if he did believe then, but he shook it off.
“And this sentry, where is he?” he asked.
Pegistus answered him. “Several of the sentries posted to the Naupent are still missing.”
“I warned you. Isn’t that the important part? I fought for you,” Sejanus said hopelessly.
“The Erondites have always been excellent at joining the winning side once they know which side that is. It doesn’t make them any less traitorous.”
“You are my king,” said Sejanus, and repeated it when the people around the tent recoiled at his audacity. “Y
ou are my king, I swear to you. I have been loyal to you since I left the villa where I was under arrest.”
“If that is so, Sejanus, tell me: who conspired with your father?”
Sejanus considered one last time. “It is not my place to decide what my king should know and not know. If you ask again, I will tell you.” He lifted his chained hands in supplication and said, “I am not begging for myself, I am begging for them. Please, don’t ask.”
I was not the only one who saw the king on the brink. Eddis and Sounis watched helplessly. But Attolia drew him back. Lightly, she laid her hand on his. “My king,” she said, “the old Erondites was dead already when someone helped Sejanus escape. Whoever did so did not act in fear of his father. Ask for that name first.” She was looking at me.
Sejanus, who had been so careful not to indict another with his eyes, was caught off guard. He followed the direction of her gaze, and so did the king.
“No.” Sejanus lunged forward and was pulled up by his chains. As he tried to take back his error, his carefully considered words turned to babbling. “It was my fault. It was all my fault. I arranged the escape and I forced Pheris to help me. Don’t blame him. In the end, he wouldn’t come with me. He came back to you. Please,” he said again and again. “Please have some mercy.”
My uncle had told the truth when he knew no one would believe him. I would not let him lie for me. I had done what I thought was right and I would not deceive my king. I stepped before the king.
I drugged the guards. I freed my uncle. Break this pot first.
I watched for the blood to drain from his face.
Instead, after a moment of astonishment, the king laughed. His amusement laced with bitterness, he shook his head.
“My dear,” he said to the queen, acknowledging a point scored. “How neatly you chain them together.”
“Turnabout is fair play,” murmured Attolia.
Return of the Thief Page 28