A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Later, when everyone was fed, there was a stirring at the far end of the room. A scrawny boy, the youngest in the barracks, who nonetheless could shift twice what I could per shovel, came crouching down beside me and hesitantly offered me his bread from the meal. “Did you hear anything of the choruses from the plays this year?” he asked.

  The baron’s food was sufficient, not generous, and I was hungry, but the boy’s ribs showed, right up to his collarbones, and I pushed his bread back at him. “I heard all of them.”

  I recited the opening of the history of the Mannae. Every man, even the overseer, listened, rapt. Instead of being tired when I was finished, I felt more awake than I had since I’d been captured. Lo, the power of poetry, I suppose. So I gave them a sketch of the plot and a few bits of the important speeches. I’ve done recitations at wine parties and in front of tutors and at the court when duty obliged. I’ve never had an audience as gratifying. I could have talked all night, but after I’d finished with the Mannae, the workers sighed happily and lay down to sleep. I lay down as well but was awake in the quiet dark for a few minutes more.

  So I took my place in the rotation and settled into the company of laborers. I rose with them in the morning and worked with them all day, slowly coming to recognize them by name and to know the jokes they shared, the friendships between them, and the animosities. They were good men, and their friendships were common and the animosities very small, in part because Ochto was a direct and effective overseer and not reluctant to clout on the head a man who was resting while others worked. Ochto had a cane to enforce his judgment, but it hung on two pegs near the door to the barracks and was rarely used. We worked with a sense of companionship and common cause, and I looked forward to the evenings, when I joined in the talk and listened to the recitations. I performed no more often than anyone else. I was a treasure to be parceled out slowly, and I savored the experience.

  My uncle had made it to his allies in the northern part of Sounis and was raising his armies against the rebels. We heard little news at first, but that much we knew in the field house because Hanaktos had sent soldiers to join Baron Comeneus. Why he was the leader of this rebellion I couldn’t begin to guess. I wouldn’t have expected him to be able to lead the more fractious of my uncle’s barons out of a hole in the ground if it was filling with water, especially after making a botch of the assassination attempt.

  The men in the barracks seemed to care very little and assumed it would all be over soon, that the king would deal as summarily with the rebels as he had in the past. I could not imagine what good result the rebels thought could come from weakening the nation when it was already in such peril, but it was the opinion of the men I worked beside that none of it had anything to do with them. By and large, I agreed with them.

  By this time I had realized that not all the men around me were slaves. Some were okloi tied to the baron’s family who worked for room and board, and some were salary men, free to go at the end of their contracts. They earned a pittance, paying most of their wages back to cover the cost of their lodging, and would have been better off tied to the baron and working for no wages at all. They had no guarantee of more work or pay at the end of their contracts, though in practice, I suppose, the baron was unlikely to let them go. I knew that I hadn’t yet grasped all the details of the pecking order, because one of the men much admired was a slave, and Ochto himself was a former slave set in place over free men, who worked very comfortably beneath him.

  One day, after I had been in the field house for a few weeks, a new worker joined us. The new man thought he should be first in line for food. When he stepped in aggressively between me and the potboy, my first reaction was surprise. Before I could register anything but that he was both taller and heavier than I was, the man behind him tugged urgently at his arm and hissed a warning under his breath: “Man-killer.”

  The new worker paused to reevaluate, but I didn’t. I couldn’t afford to lose my reputation, and I certainly would if there were a confrontation. I scooped up a wooden bowl and collected my supper. Then I walked to my bed and sat, making a show of careless bravado by crossing my legs and slumping as if I had not a worry in the world. In other words, I gave my best imitation of Eugenides. All I could do was hope the other men didn’t see through the act.

  The new man collected his own dinner and sat across the barracks from me. I spooned my dinner into my mouth as quickly as I could to hide the fact that my hands were shaking. Finally, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and looked over at him to find him staring warily back. I essayed a conciliatory smile. He hastily dropped his eyes to his supper and didn’t look up again. I glanced around at the other men, realizing that they, too, must be wary of me to let me eat first every night. Wary of me. Not of my father or the power of my uncle. Me.

  I swallowed my laugh but couldn’t stop my smile.

  The new worker’s name was Runeus. After the meal, as we returned to work, he muttered a complaint about giving way to a slave, but Helius, who was the undisputed second-in-command to Ochto and also a slave, looked over his shoulder with a glance that silenced him. I put everything I had into looking like someone who has killed another man. Telling you this now, I realize that two men were already dead at my hand, but somehow, I didn’t think of them then. I was acting a part for the other men in the barracks.

  To my continuing but carefully hidden amazement, Runeus never challenged me again. Instead, things continued much as before. Only now I knew that my place in the food line was not a happy coincidence but a marker of my place in the hierarchy of the field hands.

  The next rest day one of the men looked to me and then to the overseer. “We thought to go to the shore. Man-killer, here, can he come?” The men often went down to the water in their free time or walked out to visit friends in other field houses or to watch the dice games up on the terrace beside the megaron.

  Ochto looked me over. I had been careful to offer no trouble, and Ochto hadn’t bothered putting the bracelet and chain on my wrist at night for many days.

  Ochto nodded. Delighted, I jumped to my feet and followed the other men away from the megaron. We took the road toward town and then cut in the direction of the shore on a narrow path that led us to a break in the rocks where we could climb down to the sand to swim and then lie in the sun or the shade as each was inclined to be warmer or cooler.

  I was happy. As difficult as that must be for you to believe, and in spite of the grief I still carried for my mother and my sisters, I was happy. No one was angry at me, disappointed in me, burdened by me. I had nothing to do but sit in the warm sand and look at the sea.

  Oreus, the man who’d provided my day at the shore, dropped to the sand beside me. “So, man-killer,” he asked. “Do you have a name?”

  I thought before I answered. Wisdom is not a name for a slave. Stone, Mark, Faithful, Strong are slave names. I had a nurse once who had named her son Shovel. She was a foreigner, from somewhere far north, and she told me that she liked the way it sounded. She’d taught me a few words of her own language, but the only one I could remember was Zec, and I couldn’t quite retrieve the meaning, though it sat on the tip of my tongue.

  “Zec,” I said, as if my tongue had decided to speak for itself.

  “That’s a Hurrish name.” Oreus looked surprised. “You are from Hur?”

  “No,” I said. “My mother heard it once.”

  “It means ‘rabbit,’” Oreus said.

  I smiled. Rabbit was perfect.

  “Tell me, Rabbit. Is that your happy face you make? I can’t tell.”

  I felt my upper lip and rubbed my thumb against the scar tissue. I could feel it distorting my mouth. My nose had a new bump in the middle of it as well. Maybe I looked more like a man-killer than I’d realized.

  “Zecush, we should call you,” said Oreus. “Bunny.” He punched me lightly enough in the arm, and I almost fell over. “Come for a swim.”

  The other men seemed to think that a man-killer c
alled after a rabbit kit was a good joke. From then on they sometimes called me Zec or Zecush, but more often just Bunny. That night I slept more lightly than before and dreamed for the first time since my capture. I dreamed of a library with books and scrolls in ranks on shelves, all flooded with clear light. When I opened my eyes, the shed around me was still dark. The call to rise hadn’t yet come. I lay in the dim quiet of the predawn, listening to the breath of the sleeping men around me and thinking of my dream.

  I was still happy. It was no rest day. I faced a day in the hot sun, shifting dirt and stones, with scant food and ignorant company, and I’d never felt so much at peace. I laughed at myself as I shifted on my pallet for a more comfortable spot and a few minutes’ more rest. Let me be beaten, I thought, and then see how well I liked being a slave. Too soon the overseer knocked on the doorway with his stick, and we all rose, grumbling, for another day.

  I had grown more skilled at shifting dirt. If I couldn’t compete with some of the men in the field with me, I could keep up with most of them. I worked hard, I slept well at night, and I dreamed often. I grieved, but a part of me felt a lightening of a burden I had carried all my life: that I could never be worthy of them, that I would always disappoint or fail them. As an unknown slave in the fields of the baron, I knew the worst was over. I had failed them. At least I could not do so again.

  My dreams were lucent and vivid, as if the peacefulness of my days had put spurs to my imagination, and I dreamed again and again of the same place, the distant library with its endless collection of books and scrolls.

  In my first dream, I only wandered through the space in awe, sensing that I was impossibly far from the ordinary world of Hanaktos’s field hands. I was in an enormous room, filled with light from windows high up on the walls near the white coffered ceiling. On the wall that faced north, glass-paneled doors opened onto a balcony that looked over a green valley far below. Beyond the valley was a wall of snow-covered mountains with tops so bright they hurt the eye, and behind them an even brighter blue sky that never showed a single cloud.

  Inside the room, opposite the glass doors, were carved wooden ones that remained closed in all my visits. I had no idea what might lie beyond them, probably because I had no interest. Everything I desired was in the room with me. Between these doors, and on every other space of wall, were shelves for books and scrolls and packets of papers and every kind of writing you can imagine, even tablets impressed with minute scratches that I not only knew were writing but could read, by the magic of dreams.

  There were painted pillars to hold up the ceiling high overhead, each one covered in its own design of interleaving foliage, people, and animals. The figures repeated on the carved trim of the shelves: a set of lions on one case, a set of foxes smiling on another. They drew my touch like lodestones, and I ran my fingers over them as I explored.

  In my later dreams I wandered the shelves, selecting books and scrolls and bringing them to the tables to pore over. There were tablets of wax and clay impressed with tiny characters. There were books I knew and had already read, books the magus had told me of that I’d never seen, and even books I knew of only because their titles had been listed in ancient times. Plax’s lost plays, Dellari’s histories of the Peninsula’s War, the poetry of Hern. They all were there.

  And I had a guide as well. Still resenting Malatesta, I dreamed myself a far better tutor, who could answer my questions on every subject and never switched my hands. She was waiting for me one night. Tall even for a man and much more so for a woman, she wore a white peplos and looked just as if she had stepped from an ancient vase painting. She was like the Goddess appearing as the mentor in an epic, and I felt like a young Oenius. It was her library, I was certain, and I a welcomed guest.

  I’d dreamed the night before that I had held Poers’s History of the Bructs in my hands and read the first part of it. The magus had once summarized the book for me, from his notes. He had read it in a library in Ferria but had no copy of his own. I had been thinking lately of my uncle and what sort of king he was, and no doubt that is why the book had been on my mind.

  “What do you think of Poers, Bunny?” my tutor asked me. “Was Komanare of the Bructs a bad king?”

  She waved me to a chair and sat in one opposite.

  I wasn’t sure how to begin.

  “Do you trust Poers?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, that was clear.” She smiled, and I relaxed. “Tell me why?”

  So I picked through Poers’s arguments, looking for the places where one might suspect the author was concealing something, without knowing exactly what. It was my first talk with my imaginary tutor and the first of many times that she listened patiently, as Malatesta never had, to everything I had to say and then asked a gentle question or offered an observation. Poers makes excuses for Komanare of the Bructs. The king was forever arriving on the scene too late to do anything but patch up a mess his own people had made, always trying to get them to work with, instead of against, one another, and Poers offers one reason after another why each attempt of the king’s failed to make a lasting peace. Poers insists that none of it was the king’s fault, but Poers shows signs of fudging his historical facts in order to get his arguments to hold water, and I say that if a king can’t make his people behave, then yes, he is a bad king.

  “Well,” my tutor murmured, “at least he stayed.”

  I woke to the morning call to rise.

  In subsequent dreams, we talked about the nature of man and my uncle’s nature in particular. We did not always see eye to eye. I sometimes disagreed with her but often talked myself around to her position.

  She was amused by my interest in the system of natural categorization that the magus had taught me. I explained the importance of understanding how things are connected.

  She only smiled at my earnestness and said, “Everything is connected, Bunny, to everything else. If a man tries to transcribe each connection, thread by thread, he will only make a copy of the world and be no closer to understanding it.”

  It is a new idea, this categorizing of the world, and I suppose it seems silly to some. They think a fig tree is a fig tree, and what more do they need to know? Ambiades, who was the magus’s apprentice far longer than I ever was, never could see the point in it. The magus thought it important, though, and so did I.

  I had missed the magus sorely in the time since we had been separated. Terve was a kindhearted old drunk, and my mother and the girls were always willing to listen to me natter, but I’d had no one who was interested in the things I wondered about. Hyacinth used to cover his ears. It was no wonder I defended the magus’s work to the tutor I had replaced him with in my dreams.

  News of the outside world came to us, even in the baron’s outbuildings. Gossip flowed down from the megaron as freely as water, so it wasn’t just my own dreams that I had to think about. By late summer we heard that my uncle had retaken most of the hinterland. When he reached Mephia, we heard about the massacre. There was debate, of course, in the barracks, about the rights of the king and the punishment for rebelling. Mephia could have turned on her baron and surrendered to my uncle, but I am not sure any fewer Mephians would have died.

  I alone heard the irony as loyal retainers of Baron Hanaktos argued that the king’s rule is inviolable and that it was only right that the people of a rebel baron must suffer the consequences of his disloyalty. They didn’t seem to consider that the fate of the Mephians could be their own.

  There was less news about the islands, or rather, conflicting news. We heard that all the navy had been sunk by Attolia or that none of the navy had been sunk, that various islands had held off attacks or that they had been sacked and burned. We heard that Eddis had swept down from the area of the Irkes Forest and was building fortifications at the base of the foothills. Better that Sounis not be able to retake that property and never threaten Eddis there again, I thought.

  As the winter rains set in, the news changed. The king
controlled the countryside, and the rebels were walled up in their megarons, but inside with them were the harvests they had brought from their fields. The countryside was nearly bare, and the king needed to feed his army. He chose to withdraw toward his allies farther inland and north to resupply. As the king was driven back, the conversations around me changed: a king who loses turns out not to have been a king at all, but only a usurper, a misruler it is right to overthrow. There was talk of the Eumen conspiracy and the deaths of my uncle’s brothers.

  The men in the barracks spoke very freely. I had never in my life heard anyone but the magus speak so frankly about the Eumen conspiracy. Talk had always been in whispers and half-finished allusions, as if people feared their words might be reported to the king and they, too, might end up condemned and executed. What I knew I had overheard in bits and snatches until I was apprenticed to the magus, who dismissed with contempt any fear of the king’s anger. He told me that my uncle’s older brothers were killed and that my uncle took the throne, arrested the conspirators, and in the space of a single day executed them all, leaving no one alive to accuse him of being involved.

  No one cared what my workmates talked about among themselves, and they blithely argued my uncle’s guilt with an openness impossible in Sounis’s capital. Most believed my uncle guilty. I had never had any doubts, nor that my father was involved as well—in exchange for a promise that his son would eventually inherit the throne. My father, a royal bastard who never had any ambitions for himself, wanted his son to be king.

  It was only when I proved to be a disappointment that my father agreed that my uncle should marry and get an heir of his own. Sounis’s choice was obvious, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he might be declined. When the messenger returned from Eddis with a definite “no” for an answer, my uncle was mad with rage. I don’t know if it was thwarted greed or pride, but I know that the magus played on both to get my uncle’s financing for his expedition to steal Hamiathes’s Gift. He was determined that the two countries would be united, and insisted that Sounis could use the gift to force an alliance and a marriage upon Eddis. We know how that turned out.