The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Your Majesty, at the very least we should all be dismissed from your service,” Philologos insisted. “Whatever he implies, I—”

  “Put the snake in my bed,” the king finished for him. “Yes, I know. He was trying to save you from yourself, but he didn’t need to. I knew who delivered the snake, and who put the sand in my food. Who sent poor naive Aristogiton with the note to release the dogs, and which of you poured ink all over my favorite coat.” As he looked in turn at each attendant as he spoke, it was undeniable that he did, in fact, know. If they had looked chagrined before, they looked at him now with something very like horror. Except Sejanus, who still managed to look both smug and amused. The king turned to him last. “And I know who put the quinalums in the lethium, Sejanus.”

  Sejanus only smiled down his nose. “You can have no proof, Your Majesty.”

  “I don’t need proof, Sejanus.”

  “You do if you don’t want every baron to rise in revolt. Your absolute power really only extends as far as the barons will allow before they rise against you. Not to mention that any member of the barons’ council can question the king’s treatment of one of his men. A majority of the barons can vote to overturn your judgment, and if you have no proof, they will.”

  “Of course, if the subject in question is already executed, it is merely a matter of paying compensation.”

  Sejanus stared him down. “I don’t think you would go so far, Your Majesty. It is no easy thing for the barons to accept an outsider as king. If outraged much further, they will revolt, Eddisian garrisons or no Eddisian garrisons.”

  “Oh, I might safely go as far as I like without outraging anyone. You can’t tell me you really think your father would lift a finger to help Dite.”

  “Dite?” Sejanus seemed surprised.

  “Who else are we discussing? I admitted him to my room yesterday. I admitted him to my confidence, and he attempted to poison me. Who else could it have been? The Lady Themis? Or perhaps her sister? Heiro’s a little young to engage in political murder, don’t you think?

  “I don’t need any more proof than I already have, Sejanus. I can have him arrested today, and I will. I can have him dismembered piecemeal this evening. We will see how many clever songs he sings and plays with no hands and without his tongue.”

  Sejanus was still shaking his head slowly back and forth.

  “Your father won’t care. He will thank me for relieving him of an embarrassment of an heir and for making the way clear for you to inherit.” He smiled. “You won’t mind either, will you? We know how much you hate your brother. While you, Sejanus, are my very dear friend, whom I will keep by my side even if I were to turn out every other attendant.”

  Sejanus paled. His disdainful smile faded. “I poisoned the lethium,” he said suddenly, forcefully.

  “What?” The king raised an eyebrow, as if he’d heard incorrectly.

  “I put the quinalums in the lethium. I have a friend who is a priest. He got the powder, and I added it to the lethium yesterday.”

  The king asked, “Now, why would you do that?”

  “I hate you,” Sejanus answered, as if he were reciting the lines in a play. “You have no right to the throne of Attolia.”

  The king blinked in astonishment.

  “I am very sorry it didn’t kill you,” said Sejanus venomously. “I thought I put in enough to kill a horse.”

  “In that case, I suppose I will have you arrested.”

  “Very well, Your Majesty.” Sejanus was all disdain again.

  “And your brother.”

  “No!”

  “You have confessed. I feel sure you are willing, under persuasion, to reveal his complicity.”

  “My brother had nothing to do with it. I acted alone. I acted entirely alone.”

  The king, looking down at the bedcover, ran his hand across the embroidered cloth and said nothing. The silence went on.

  Sejanus swallowed. When he swallowed again, it was his pride. As the other attendants looked on, more puzzled than anything else, he said, “Your Majesty, I will confess to any crime you name, but my brother is innocent.”

  “You’ve already confessed to attempted regicide,” said the king. “What else could you confess?” He looked up from where he had been carefully smoothing the embroidered cover, and seeing his face, Costis felt the shock like a physical blow. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating. “Do you think I intend to leave your father an heir?”

  Gods in their heaven, Costis thought, did Erondites have only the two children?

  He had seen a temple fall once, in an earthquake. Small gaps had appeared between the stones, and these had grown until each separate stone tottered in opposition to the ones below. First the columns supporting the porches and then the walls had tumbled down. So, piece by piece, did the king hammer out the enormity of the disaster Sejanus had precipitated on his house.

  “Your father disinherited your sister and all children of hers when she married against his wishes. He did it formally. That’s why he couldn’t disinherit Dite. A wise man doesn’t leave himself with only one heir. He had to keep Dite, because there are so many things to kill a man off between one day and the next—disease, war…poison, for instance. Also, there was a chance that Dite might succeed with the queen and marry her. What a coup that would have been for the house of Erondites. But Dite didn’t succeed; I married the queen. Poor useless Dite.

  “Now your father loses both of you together. He could get rid of your mother, remarry, and get himself another heir, but he doesn’t need a baby, he needs a full-grown heir who can fend for himself and support his father.”

  “You have no evidence against Dite. I won’t give you any.”

  “And my barons might not like evidence dragged out of your screaming mouth?” the king asked.

  “I will retract my confession. I can deny that I ever made it.”

  “You have a point. But I have one, too. I have many of them, sons and nephews of barons, all standing here on the verge of being banished for what even your most sensitive barons would agree is egregious misbehavior. How ironic that they have been forced into this compromising position…by you.” He waved at the attendants. “Do you think they will lie for you, Sejanus? They may not like me, but they hate you by now. And their families hate your father. He has bribed, bartered, and blackmailed his way to power, but mostly blackmailed. No single baron can risk offending him, but if there is a way to bring him down, with no risk to themselves, every baronial house will jump at it.”

  “I still won’t give you any evidence against Dite. Not that you could execute him for.”

  “I don’t need to execute him, Sejanus. All I have to do is banish him for being an embarrassment to the throne. I have all the evidence I need for that.”

  That stupid song, thought Costis.

  Sejanus thought it through, and like a puppet with its strings cut, or like the temple collapsing on itself, he landed on his knees before the king with a force that must have rattled his teeth in his head.

  “He cannot support himself,” Sejanus said.

  The king agreed. “He has no money. Your father hasn’t provided him any for years. He has lived on the queen’s charity and spent every coin she has given him. Within a month he will be begging on a street corner somewhere on the Peninsula, and within two months groveling in the mud for a crust of bread, and within the year, he will be dead. On the other hand, if you try to retract your confession, I will have one dragged out of him, and then I will have him drawn and quartered. You can decide which is preferable. After all, he might make a living for himself, selling his songs from a gutter on the Peninsula.”

  Sejanus put a hand to his head.

  “Your father won’t support him.” The king hammered on. “What would be the point of an heir who cannot manage the family from exil
e? Your father will instantly disinherit him and pick another heir. Only…if a man chooses someone, not his own offspring, as heir, he must obtain the approval of the throne. Me. My approval.”

  Sejanus buried his face in his hands.

  “Your cousins, your uncles, your every illegitimate sibling will be scrambling before the day is out. All of them straining to be the next Baron Erondites, all of them stabbing each other in the back. They must be chosen by your father, so they will seek his favor. They must be approved by me, and so they will seek mine. If we cannot agree, and your father dies without an heir, the entire estate reverts to the throne. I will choose an heir for him.”

  The king looked from the diased bed down at Sejanus. “The house of Erondites,” he promised, “will not survive.”

  They could hear Sejanus’s breathing, baffled by his carefully manicured hands.

  “Your Majesty.” He dropped his hands, but didn’t look up as he spoke. He concentrated his gaze on the floor, as if he had this one last thing to say and meant to say it well. “My brother has served the queen loyally. He would serve you as well. He has never been anything but loyal. Please. Please let your revenge fall on me, who deserves it. Not on my house. Not on my brother. Let me confess to any crime you like and be punished in any way you choose.” He licked his lips. “I beg you.”

  “It isn’t revenge, Sejanus,” said this new incarnation of the king. “I wouldn’t destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house. Your brother will be exiled, your house will fall, not because I happen to hate you, but because Erondites controls more land, and more men, than any four other barons stacked together and has proved to be dangerous over and over. Its very existence is a threat to the throne. It will not survive,” he said again.

  He gave Sejanus time then to think it all through, to find some escape, but there was none. The baron’s son cast a brief glance at the other attendants, but he’d lost his hold over them. Even if he retracted the confession, he had made it in front of too many witnesses. They were the younger sons and nephews of the most influential barons in the state and they would repeat everything they had heard to their uncles and fathers. The council of the barons wouldn’t support someone who’d confessed to the attempted murder of the king. His father had too many enemies who would be delighted at the fall of the house. There was no hope, and only Dite’s fate lay in his hands.

  “I will not retract the confession,” said Sejanus. “I will give you any evidence you need, except against Dite, if you will exile him instead of killing him.”

  “Thank you,” said the king.

  Sejanus looked up at last. Then, with a little effort, he shrugged, like a man who has lost a bet on a footrace or a roll of dice. Accepting a shattering defeat with some dignity intact, he was more likable than he ever had been in the past. Costis almost felt sorry for him.

  Sejanus saluted the king. “Basileus,” he said, using the archaic term for the fabled princes of the ancient world.

  He looked over his shoulder as if to summon the guards in the doorway who were stepping forward to lift him to his feet, and he left the room without another word.

  The attendants exchanged glances in the silence after his departure, but they didn’t speak. The queen entered and sank into a chair. The king inched himself backward with a grimace and settled back against the headboard.

  Two of the queen’s attendants had come in behind her: Chloe and Iolanthe. All of the king’s attendants but Sejanus remained, as well as Costis, still standing uncomfortably by the small upholstered chair. The room was full of people.

  “Ninety-eight days,” said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. “You said it would take six months.”

  Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. “I like to give myself a margin. When I can.”

  “I didn’t believe you,” the queen admitted with a delicate smile.

  “Now you know better.” The king smiled back. They might as well have been alone.

  The queen turned her head to listen. There was shouting in the guardroom. Costis tensed. His hand went to his belt, looking for his sword.

  “That will be Dite,” said the king. “He must have been in the outer rooms. I may as well see him.”

  The queen rose and stepped behind the embroidered screen in front of the fireplace. Her attendants withdrew. The king’s attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.

  Dite, when he came to the door, braced by two guards, was as white as his brother had been by the time he left. He, too, dropped to his knees by the king’s bed, but he didn’t look at the floor. He stared up at the king’s face, seeking answers.

  “I warned you,” said the king, in a level voice.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “And I told you to warn your brother.”

  “I know, Your Majesty. I did warn him. Even though I didn’t believe what you told me, but why would my brother try to poison you?”

  “He didn’t,” said the king, and when Dite stared at him at a loss, he explained, “He confessed to protect you. He thought you put the quinalums in the lethium.”

  “I didn’t!” Dite protested.

  “No,” said the king. “I did.”

  “Why?” Dite asked, helplessly. “Why?”

  “I didn’t drink any of the filthy stuff,” the king snapped. “Dite, I don’t need quinalums to give me nightmares; they come on their own. The gods send them to keep me humble.”

  There was no stroke of humility about him, and if Costis had ever wished to see him look more like a king, his wish was answered. He found the prospect was unsettling.

  “Then my brother is guilty of no crime?”

  “Oh, he’s guilty of a crime, Dite. Just not guilty of the one he confessed to. He’s guilty of leading, cajoling, and bullying every single one of my attendants into criminal misbehavior.” He swept his eye over the attendants. “And conspiring with your father to have them all dismissed, excepting himself, so that I could choose new attendants more to the liking of the Baron Erondites. With Sejanus’s help, of course, and the help of the mistress the baron had picked out for me—only I kept dancing with her sister—who, by the way, has lovely earrings.”

  “I see,” said Dite, hesitantly.

  “No, you don’t. Neither did I. Because Sejanus, in the process of corrupting my attendants, was supposed to be making himself indispensable to me, which he dramatically and inarguably failed to do. Your father wanted me neatly snared. Your brother wanted me dead. He was on a balcony overlooking the garden directing the assassins to where they would find me.”

  “But you had no proof?”

  “None that I wanted to bring into the light of day.”

  “So you put quinalums in the lethium and got him to confess to that.”

  “I did. Would you prefer, now that I have had him arrested, that I extract a confession for the crime he did commit?”

  Dite lifted his hands hopelessly. “You will execute him?”

  The king shook his head. “No.”

  “Thank you,” Dite gasped. “Oh, thank you.”

  “Don’t,” said the king, holding up his hand. “Don’t thank me. Your father will be somewhat more tractable so long as he thinks there is some hope of Sejanus’s release. That is the only reason Sejanus lives. Unfortunately, it eliminates any chance that your father will support you in your exile, Dite, and is no favor to you.”

  Dite dropped his eyes, but didn’t complain. Painfully, the king leaned to his right, reaching with his left hand to flick open the drawer in the table beside the bed. Catching it by its strings, he pulled out a purse, then reached back for a folded document. Sitting back up, he tossed the purse to the edge of the bed and handed the document to Dite.

  “You can use some of the money in the purse to address…family matters. The rest should get you to the Peninsula. The p
aper is a letter of introduction to the Duke of Ferria. He is holding the position of court music master open for you.”

  Dite turned the packet over in his hands. “Ferria,” he said in wonder.

  “I’m sorry, Dite.”

  Dite shrugged away the apology. “You have spared my brother when you could have killed him and you have offered me an escape from the cesspit of my family and this court. You know what it means to me, to make music in the court of Ferria. You’ve put a purse and an impossible dream in my hand. I don’t know why you should apologize.”

  “Because I am exiling you, Dite. I intend to raze your patrimony and salt its earth. You emphatically do not need to thank me.”

  Dite got to his feet to take his leave of the king. Still looking at the paper and the purse in his hand, he said, “You never said why Sejanus would want you dead.”

  The king looked sad then, and answered gently, “For your sake, Dite.”

  Dite’s head came up.

  “Brotherly love.” The king shrugged.

  “And you let us live, and give me this.” He held up the paper and the purse.

  “I think we have cleared the difficulties between you and me, Dite.”

  Dite nodded. “Fortunately so, for me. I did warn him, as you asked me to.”

  “It isn’t your fault he didn’t believe you,” said the king. “Nor that he is as fond of you as you are of him. It may save him someday, when I no longer need him alive.”

  Dite looked at him. “I hope so. I beg so, Your Majesty. He is very dear to me.”

  “You need to be on ship by nightfall.”

  “I will be,” Dite assured him. He glanced at the embroidered screen before the fireplace and then back at the king. Then he said, with a bow and a smile, “Be blessed in your endeavors.”

  The king chuckled. “Good-bye, Dite.”

  When Dite had left, the queen stepped from behind the screen, speaking as she came. She said, “If he considers my court a cesspit, I wonder why he has remained here so long.”