The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  The queen said, “No matter how securely I hold the reins of power, so long as I had no husband, my barons had to fight, afraid that someone else might seize that power. Only if they could be certain that that goal was out of their reach, and out of their neighbors’ reach as well, would there be peace, Relius. Oh, there are stupid men among them, and a few warmongers, but mostly, you and I know that they fight me because they are afraid of each other. If there were a king, secure in his power, the barons would unite.

  “I have bought all the time I can against the coming of the Mede,” she said. “If Attolia is not united when they strike again, then we are all, king, queen, patronoi, and okloi, lost. But it is not up to me alone, Relius, whether or not Eugenides will be king or just appear as one.”

  “He refuses?”

  “He refuses to either defend or assert his position. He just…looks the other way and pretends he doesn’t hear. He cannot be led, or driven. The Eddisian Ambassador has tried everything, I think, including extortion, and failed. I think he is afraid.”

  “Ornon or the king?”

  “Both. Ornon looks more and more like a man at the edge of a precipice every day. But I think Eugenides is afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of failing,” said Attolia, as if that fear, at least, Relius should have recognized. “Of stealing my power from me.”

  “You would only be stronger.”

  “I know,” Attolia soothed him. “I did not say that I am afraid. He is, though, I think. Afraid of his own desire for power. He is not unused to wielding power, but it has always been in secret. I could, of course, command him to be king. He will give me anything I ask.”

  “That would only confirm your sovereignty, not his,” Relius objected.

  “So,” agreed the queen.

  Relius considered her, sitting beside him. She didn’t seem unduly concerned. “I am confident, My Queen, that if you have met your match, so has he.”

  “He is stubborn,” Attolia reminded him, “and very strong.”

  “Surely he revealed himself in the fall of Erondites?” Relius asked.

  “The barons have come trooping through my bedchamber, to have a new look at him.”

  “And?” prompted Relius.

  “He simpers. He preens.”

  Relius snorted. “I suppose that the barons reported that the plan must have been yours all along, that the king was your witless tool.”

  “So.” The queen nodded. She looked down at her hands, lying quiet in her lap, while Relius imagined the scene the king must have enacted, no different from the scenes he himself had witnessed when the king was playing the fool.

  “You must force him into the open,” Relius warned her.

  She raised her head, and he was aghast to see her eyes bright with tears. “I am tired of driving people and forcing them to my will. I am like a war chariot with bladed wheels, scything down those closest to me, enemies and my dearest friends alike.”

  “I failed you, My Queen,” Relius reminded her.

  “You served me. I rewarded you with torture and, if not for his intervention, with death. He loves me, and I reward his love by forcing on him something he hates. In the evening, after we dance, he rarely returns to the throne; he dances with others or he moves from place to place through the room. The court thinks he is trying to be gracious, sharing his attention. Only I see that he moves always toward the empty spot and the court moves always after him. He is like a dog trying to escape its own tail. He indulged himself in one brief moment of privacy and almost died of it. Relius, he hates being king.”

  Relius thought of his companion of the past nights and their wide-ranging conversations and the king’s laughter.

  Still diffident, he disagreed with his queen. “The Thieves of Eddis have always been set apart, Your Majesty. He has had very little company in his life, and he isn’t used to it. But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. Drive him out. Whether he wants to or not, he belongs in the open. The world needs to see what a king he is.”

  “Whatever the cost to him?”

  “No man can choose to serve only himself when he has something to offer to his state. No one can put his own wishes above the needs of so many.”

  “Take care,” the queen said softly. “Take care, my dear friend.”

  Relius lay very still.

  “I am an exceedingly effective scythe,” the queen said.

  Relius smiled wanly back. “And I offer you justification out of my own mouth. There is no house waiting for me in some obscure village in the Gede Valley, is there?”

  “Not in the Gede Valley, no. There is one in the Modrea, two floors and an open court, as well as an atrium, a study downstairs. There’s a little land at the back, for goats.”

  Relius waited.

  “Or you could stay with me. I need you still. Attolia needs you still.”

  The tears rose in Relius’s silent eyes. He closed them and thought in the darkness about a house in the Gede Valley or the Modrea with a study downstairs and a small fountain, no doubt, and the sound of goats, and peace.

  “I am what you have made of me,” the queen said softly.

  Relius smiled through his own tears. “And you may mow me down a hundred times, My Queen, with my best wishes. But I am a failure and a wreck. I cannot see how I could be of any use to you.”

  “You are not a failure, and for my sake, I hope you are not a wreck. As to what use you may be, shall we wait and see?” she asked.

  When Relius agreed, sadly relinquishing in his thoughts the quiet farm in the Modrea Valley, Attolia asked if he had changed his opinion on whether the king should be driven to a task he hated, now that he himself had been manipulated by the queen.

  “I only hope you can be as effective with the king,” Relius said.

  Attolia admitted the challenge. “The whole Mede Empire was easier to redirect,” she said. “Ornon was right to say that he could not be driven. I don’t know why he continues to try.”

  “I think he is providing a foil for you, My Queen, and waiting for you to make your move.”

  “I made it already,” said Attolia. “On my wedding night. You have heard no doubt the events of our wedding night?”

  Relius looked away. “He said that you…cried,” he said softly.

  “But not that he cried as well,” said the queen, amused at the memory. “We were very lachrymose.”

  “Is that what he told Dite in the garden?” Relius asked, fitting puzzle piece to puzzle piece.

  “I think so. I haven’t asked either of them outright. Would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me that the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head.”

  “Is that when he cried?”

  “He ducked,” said Attolia dryly.

  Grown more confident of the queen’s humor, Relius said, “I had not pictured you for a fishwife.”

  “Lo, the transforming power of love.”

  “The Guard,” Relius said thoughtfully.

  “Your own pet worry,” said Attolia.

  “Will you reduce it?”

  “You know why I have not. Because I cannot, not with the Mede raising its armies and my barons still divisive. The Guard is the loyal heart of my forces.”

  “And your barons will go on being divisive so long as Eugenides is a figurehead.”

  Attolia waited.

  “And Eugenides is resisting being king. And?” prompted Relius.

  Attolia raised her hands in a mockery of helplessness. “I agreed to reduce the Guard.”

  Relius waited.

  “With the condition that he needs to ask Teleus and have Teleus agree.”

  Relius laughed outright. He was sufficiently healed that no pain forced him to stop.

  The queen said, with a ladylike chuckle, “I believe you handled me just the same once. When you told me I could install an okloi general just as soon as I had the approval of the co
uncil of barons.”

  “And I was right,” said Relius. “Once you had shown you could sway that council, you could install anyone you wished.”

  “Am I not right?”

  “Entirely right. Teleus won’t bow to superior force. He won’t bow to reason either, and damn his pigheadedness, he won’t bow for his own salvation, but he’ll bow to a king. If Teleus thinks Eugenides is a king, it will only be because he is one. It is a brilliant strategy, My Queen.”

  “It is good to hear you say so,” said Attolia quietly, looking at her hands, resting still in her lap. “I have missed your advice.”

  The queen gathered her skirts, preparing to rise. Hesitantly, Relius lifted his hand to stop her. “My Queen,” he said, “when you said that you had trusted me all these years…?”

  The smile she so often hid in her voice came to her face then. It was a smile Relius had been privileged to see before. He knew he shared that privilege with few others. It pleased him deeply to know that one of those others was the king. “Yes, Relius,” said the queen, smiling. “I have trusted you, and no, that does not mean that I have not had you watched and that I do not have spies that watch my spies, and spies even that watch those.”

  “Good,” said Relius, relieved.

  The queen shook her head and warned him, “That is over now, my friend. You have been elevated to a new rank, where you are trusted unconditionally. Don’t look so uncomfortable. I have learned that there is a flaw in your philosophy. If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.” She bent to kiss his cheek, then gathered her skirts and was gone. Relius was left behind in the quiet room, considering a new philosophy.

  The events of the state rolled on. The queen showed every sign of affection for her king, and it was accepted as a necessary artifice. The courtiers walked warily of Eugenides; though he was no more than a tool for the queen, he was obviously a dangerous one. The Guard clung to a sense of offense on behalf of their captain. The great states of the Continent politely disbelieved any rumors of war from the Mede Empire, and the King of Sounis slowly recaptured control of his country, though there was still no word of Sophos, the missing heir. Sejanus was tried for conspiring to commit regicide, giving evidence that the assassins had been sent by Sounis. The queen, supposedly at the direction of the king, ordered that he be spared the ultimate penalty for his crimes, and he was sent to be incarcerated in the hinterland. The last of the assassins died in the queen’s prison after revealing that his services had been provided to the King of Sounis by Nahuseresh, the former Ambassador to Attolia from the Mede Empire.

  The attendants stood listening to the muffled sounds of destruction. That they could hear anything at all was indicative of the violence of the proceedings on the far side of the heavy wooden door. At each crash they winced. Glad to be in the king’s guardroom, not in his bedchamber with him, Ion met Sotis’s glance and rolled his eyes.

  The king had moved back to his rooms a week earlier. Where he slept was anyone’s guess. The attendants knew that they put him to bed in his bedchamber, and that when they knocked at the door in the morning, he was there to unlock it. Now they knew that this was the entirety of what they knew.

  In an interview that morning with the new Secretary of the Archives, the Baron Hippias, Eugenides had learned that the assassins from Sounis had been sent by Nahuseresh. Afterward, the king had excused himself graciously from the queen and returned to his rooms for what was supposed to be a change of clothes before lunch with a foreign ambassador.

  But he hadn’t changed his clothes. Instead he had silently waved his attendants out of the bedchamber and closed the door behind them with a benevolent smile, and then, as far as they could tell from the noise, he’d broken every breakable thing in the room.

  The noises stopped some time before they heard the door unlock. The king depressed the latch and let it swing open behind him as he turned back toward the center of the room. The attendants paced hesitantly into the destruction. There were broken bits of the side chairs scattered across the carpet. The hangings above the king’s bed were ribboned tatters.

  “The person who describes this to the queen will be flayed.” The king spoke quietly. The attendants moved from nervous to fearful.

  “Your Majesty,” said Ion. The king didn’t seem to be listening. Ion licked his lips and tried again. “Your Majesty,” he whispered. The king turned and looked at him impassively. “I-I am sure…I assure you…no one here will speak of it.”

  The king passed his hand across his face. “That will have to do,” he said. “I will change in the wardrobe. Cleon and Ion can attend me. The rest of you—” He looked around at the wreckage. “Clean up what you can.”

  “Sacred altars,” Lamion whispered when he was gone. “Does he think there will be anyone in the palace who doesn’t hear about this?”

  Philologos passed the velvet ribbons of the bed hangings through his hand. The bedpost nearby was marked as if hammered over and over with a pickax. The wood was splintered and gouged. The holes were surprisingly deep.

  “They won’t know details. They won’t hear any from us.”

  “They won’t need to,” said Hilarion.

  Philologos poked his fingers into the holes.

  The attendants began collecting the remains of the chairs. They looked helplessly at the wall, splattered with overlapping explosions of different colored ink. The unbreakable inkwells lay on the carpet. Fine ceramic pieces of the more fragile inkwells crunched underfoot. One inkwell, lying on its side, was carved diorite. It had left a dent in the plastered wall. Below the king’s scriptorium was an array of writing utensils swept from its surface. Pens and nibs, papers and the weights he used to hold them while he wrote, were all scattered in mute testimony to frustration and rage.

  Silently the attendants contrasted the evidence before their eyes to the calm behavior of the king as he had returned from the audience with Hippias.

  “Our little king doesn’t like people trying to assassinate him.”

  “He isn’t angry because someone tried to kill him,” Philologos said sharply.

  “How do you know that, Philo, dear?”

  But Philologos had had enough of being condescended to. “Because, Lamion, I am not as dumb as you think I am, even if you are.”

  By the time Lamion had parsed this to be sure there was in fact an insult at the end of it, Hilarion had laid a restraining hand on his arm.

  “So, tell us, Philologos, your insight.”

  “He isn’t angry because Nahuseresh tried to have him killed,” Philologos told them. “He is angry because he can’t go kill Nahuseresh in return.”

  “Because he is king,” agreed Hilarion.

  “Not because he’s king,” Philologos said, disgusted by their dull wits. “Because he has only one hand,” he said, voicing the king’s bitterness as his own.

  The attendants looked around them at the mess, at the fabric sliced again and again until it hung in threads, and the bedpost marked by gouges. They looked back at Philologos with new respect.

  “That’s what he doesn’t want the queen to know about.”

  No one disagreed. They turned their attention to cleaning what they could and arranging for the wall to be repaired, and discussed, very carefully, how they might suggest to the rest of the court that the king’s tantrum was caused by his dislike of Nahuseresh, and nothing else.

  Costis panted as he hurried up the stone steps past the last flickering lamp and onto the dark walk that ran around the roof of the palace. Aris was waiting for him at the top. Behind them rose the dark bulk of the inner palace. In front of them was the city with a few lights burning on its dark streets and farther out the harbor, with the dim lights on ships glowing against the deeper black of the sea. Costis shivered. The night air was cool, and he’d raised a sweat hurrying across the palace after the messenger Aristogiton had sent to knock on his door frame and wake him in the early hours of the dog watch of the night.

  “What is it?” he
asked, not happy to have been dragged out without an explanation. “Your messenger wouldn’t—”

  “Shh,” said Aris, and pointed out toward the outer wall. His eyes not yet accustomed to the dark after coming up from the lighted courtyard below, Costis saw only a dim silhouette against the sky.

  “That’s not—” Costis whispered.

  “The king. Yes, it is,” said Aris.

  “He’s on top of the crenellations.” Costis had patrolled this wall many times and knew those crenellations. They rose from the parapet, about two feet high and each about three feet long, narrowing to a ridge along the top. As he watched, the king moved to the end of one crenellation and then hopped across the intervening space to the next.

  Costis opened his mouth to say, “Why doesn’t someone tell him to get down?” when he realized why Aris had summoned him from his warm bed. “No,” he said firmly, “not me.”

  “Costis, please.”

  “Where are his cursed attendants?” Costis hissed.

  “Behind you,” said Ion.

  Costis whirled to see a handful of them standing in the dark. They had been no friend of Costis’s when he was with the king. They’d made it clear that their waiting room was no place for common soldiers, and now they wanted him to tell the king to get down off the wall before he fell and broke every bone in his body.

  “Go to hell,” said Costis. He turned back to the stairs.

  “Costis, please,” begged Aris.

  “It isn’t my business,” said Costis. “Besides, he probably does this sort of thing all the time at home.”

  “Maybe he does, but not with a wineskin in his hand,” said Ion, flatly. Staring, Costis could see the wineskin swinging as the king jumped to the next crenellation.

  “It’s not my business,” Costis insisted, as flatly.

  “It’s my business,” said Aris, catching him by the arm. “I’m on watch. If he falls, Costis, I’ll hang for it. Please.”

  Costis said nothing.

  “We’ll all hang for it,” said Hilarion. “I know why you don’t want to get involved. You certainly owe us no favors, but I swear on my honor, Costis, name your price and we’ll pay it, if you can get him off that wall.”