A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  It was a plan that might see most of them dead by nightfall of the next day, and they nodded agreeably and went to inform their men. They didn’t ask, and I couldn’t say, why I thought we should make our stand at Oneia. I had made my decision, and they had made theirs.

  It was well into the night before I was finished with plans and staggered up to my rooms to find Nomenus waiting for me.

  He was sitting on a stool not far from the fireplace. His hands were clasped together on one knee, and he was miles away in his thoughts, not even realizing at first that I had arrived. When he saw me in the doorway, he stood. He looked me in the face briefly before lowering his eyes.

  “Your Majesty,” he said softly.

  “I thought you would be long gone,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Nowhere to go?” I asked. “There are ten thousand Mede soldiers in Tas-Elisa to welcome you.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Brimedius won’t take you in?”

  “I am not his man,” Nomenus replied. I knew whose man he was.

  “I killed Hanaktos,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I walked closer to him. He was less calm than he appeared. “You’re shaking.”

  He shrugged again, the barest shift of a shoulder. “I would kill me if I were you,” he said.

  I didn’t know what else to do with him. I certainly wasn’t going to let him walk away free and clear after he’d served me with lies and deceit.

  “Your Majesty, they have cells here,” he said, “in the outbuildings. I might yet serve you if you didn’t—if I wasn’t—” Finally he said flatly, “Things might not go as you hope.”

  “If Akretenesh wins?” I had to laugh. “If I am installed as his puppet, you are saying that I could call you back to lie to me?” I made no effort to hide my amazement.

  “I could serve you. As well as—”

  “As well as they’d let you?”

  He gave up a shaky sigh and dropped to his knees. He bowed his head, and then he just waited.

  I’d had an entire day of whining, self-serving patronoi denying their every transgression and vomiting up excuse after excuse. This was a man who at least didn’t try to pretend to stainless virtue. It was probably calculated, and if so, it was well done. He knew me better, after all, than the barons did and knew what was most likely to sway me. I found I had no desire to see him die.

  I called in the guards from beside my door and sent him off with them to be locked up somewhere.

  “See that he’s fed,” I called after them, “and taken out occasionally for air.” At my words Nomenus struggled briefly in their arms. As he looked back at me over his shoulder, I saw the fear in his face. He didn’t say anything, though, just stared at me as they led him away.

  If Akretenesh did defeat me, and if he didn’t kill me outright, I would have Ion Nomenus to attend me in my puppet show. At least I’d know he was a liar; I wouldn’t have to wonder.

  In the dark hours of the morning, I exercised the privilege of a king: I slept. I never even heard the noise as the Eddisians and the Attolians I had asked the magus to send me arrived. I had more than five hundred men among the barons and their retinues. I’d been correct about the weapons that had been concealed. Every baron and his men were armed, but they weren’t an army, and altogether we were fewer than two thousand against ten.

  When the sky was growing light, my father knocked on my door. I washed my face and dressed, missing Nomenus already, and then went down the stairs to find something to eat before the day began.

  By the time the sun was up, we were far down the narrow road to Oneia. The first spot I had in mind to stand and fight was more than two-thirds of the way to the sea. The road followed a watercourse, and the hills for most of the way were too steep to climb without care and attention, but the narrow valley began to open out as it neared the coast. The hillsides beside the road were both less high and less steep. I knew, as I hoped that the Medes did not, that just behind the rise of those hills there was a level spot. Then, out of sight from the road below, the hillside rose much higher. I put my Attolians just behind the top of the lower hill and sent my barons and the Eddisians to find cover on the upper slope.

  When the Medes came, their weapons glinting in the sun that had burned off the sea mist, the Attolians brought their crossbows to bear, firing down with accuracy too deadly to ignore.

  The army was traveling only ten abreast and cheek by jowl on the narrow roadbed. At a shouted command, a block moved forward and reordered itself as it came, shaping into a phalanx of twenty by twenty and moving up the hill at top speed. The Attolians’ fire slowed them not at all.

  The Attolians on the hill formed into their own blocks and charged down. That did slow the first of the Medes, but as more phalanxes came up, they pressed forward. I was on the upper hill, screened by takima bushes, but I could see very well. The noise was overwhelming. I didn’t remember noise like this at the battle near Brimedius. The hammering sounds of weapons ran together and were so loud that very soon, instead of hearing it, I felt I could hear nothing at all.

  The Attolians couldn’t hold the hillside. Step by step they were forced back. Suddenly, they broke ranks and retreated. The Medes followed, lured out of their phalanxes, their mouths open in inaudible shouting.

  They topped the hill, and their expressions changed. Too late they looked for their side men, but their side men were out of reach. On my command, the Eddisians charged from above. Their momentum carried them through the disordered enemy and across the brow of the lower hill. The weakened Mede phalanxes disintegrated, like trees losing leaves in a high wind. The Eddisians continued on down the hill toward the army below, still in its tight marching formation.

  All the ten thousand men of the Mede fighting force were trapped behind their own front line. Those in the frontline troops, with the enemy bearing down on them, recoiled. The front line pushed back into its own pikemen, who couldn’t stop the men behind them, who were pushing forward.

  I should be humble, but I’m not. I was delighted. Everything was working just as I’d hoped. I stood on the hillside and cheered. The men around me shouted with me. We watched the confusion traveling back up the line of the Mede army like the contractions of an earthworm, while the Eddisians continued to hack at the front line. Then we scrambled and slid down the hill to the road and hurried on toward Oneia.

  We could have stayed and replaced the Eddisians in the battle line as they fought to the last, but we would have been putting ourselves in the same position as the Medes: most of our men in back with just a few at the head of the line to fight. With both armies limited by the narrow roadway, the Medes would soon prevail.

  Instead we hurried away. Once the road was clear, the Eddisians would turn and follow us at a run. The curves of the road were all that would protect them from the Mede fire until they reached the open ground around Oneia, where we would be waiting to give them cover. We would have the advantage of space to spread out and fight. The Medes would still be in the roadway, and as they issued from it a few at a time, we would take them. Sooner or later the great pressure of men would overwhelm us. That would be the time for each man to kill as many as he could before he died.

  I ran, with my father just behind me. I slowed, but he didn’t move up, and I realized he was shielding me. My armor plate would stop an arrow or a bullet at that range, but not a crossbow quarrel. There weren’t any crossbow quarrels, however, or bullets, and all it did was slow me down. I was staggering by the time I heard the shouting ahead of us, and the clanging of metal against metal. My father suddenly passed me and then slowed and looked backward, clearly undecided which enemy to face.

  Gasping, I tugged on his shoulder and tried to catch enough breath to reassure him. The men around us slowed, but I waved them forward and staggered on. It wasn’t shouting, it was cheering, I was almost certain. We came around the last curve in the road, and we saw them: rank after rank of men in th
e blue and gold of Attolia waiting for us, banging their weapons and yelling.

  “Attolis,” I gasped to my father. “He sent more men.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EARLIER in the day, the magus had slowed the Medes on the coast road as they tried to fight their way from the port to Elisa, so that nearly a third of their column was still in the Elisa Valley and not yet on the road down to Oneia when the armies of my loyalist barons came over the hills from the hinterlands. The loyalists had been traveling all night by torchlight and went directly to battle without a rest.

  Down in Oneia, the head of the Mede army was crushed with the help of the fresh Attolian troops. The Attolians had arrived only the day before and during the previous night, transferring in small boatloads to the tiny beach below Oneia. If the weather had not been calm, they couldn’t have done it and would have been sitting offshore as we died.

  As it happened, the Medes were forced by the pressure of men coming down behind them along the roadway and out into the open to face a coordinated attack where their greater numbers never benefited them. It was madness for their general to commit all his forces on such a road, and I can only think that he fatally underestimated me. Perhaps he, too, had been listening to the Mede ambassador in Attolia.

  When the Medes finally organized their retreat, we followed them up toward Elisa. I’d sent men around to reach our ambush site from behind to cover the hillside with their fire, so that the Medes could not treat us as we had treated them.

  I learned afterward that in the Elisa Valley the Medes had tried to break away and drive for the capital road, only to find that pass blocked by Hanaktos’s army. Hanaktia is a woman of iron and had taken me at my word when I said that there would be a remedy for all transgressions. She had left the safety of Elisa and ridden herself to her late husband’s soldiers to rally them to fight against the Medes.

  I am afraid that the side effect of all this will be a burnishing of our reputation for two-faced deal making. It is unflattering, but the Medes will think twice before making any bargains with future rebels if they believe we are all unreliable allies.

  Unable to clear a path of retreat toward the capital, the Medes were forced to fight their way back across the valley and down the road to the port at Tas-Elisa. They were harried at every step and arrived in complete darkness. Thanks to the magus’s work with the townspeople, before the Medes even arrived, the soldiers found themselves locked out of the walled town.

  The Mede ships in the harbor had cannons to provide covering fire. Under that and the small-arms fire from the town walls, the few thousand Medes who were left scrambled into shoreboats and were hauled to their ships. My army settled into the tents that had been provided for the Medes, ate their provisions, and enjoyed their wine, while the townspeople sensibly stayed inside their closed walls and refused to let anyone in, including me. Being turned away was a surprise, but I was too relieved by the entire course of the day to care. I rode up to Elisa in the dark, with the sounds of victory slowly fading into the song of nightbirds and insects, and fell into my own kingly bed at dawn.

  The bodies were gathered over the next few days, stripped, and then burned. The weapons were collected in a makeshift armory in Tas-Elisa. I meant to restore the truce at Elisa as quickly as possible, so I stored no weapons there. I will pay a whopping fine to the treasury to assuage the outrage of the priests. Though I have escaped any lightning strikes of the gods, I regret bringing war to the place of festivals, and Elisa must have its truce if Sounis is to elect any kings in the future.

  We acquired twelve cannons as well, which was an unlooked-for windfall. Evidently the Medes had off-loaded them from their ships to be used at some point in the future. We found them the morning after the battle as the proctors attempted to bring some order to the chaos that was several thousand soldiers sleeping off a drunk. Akretenesh told me I must return the cannons, and I laughed in his face.

  Akretenesh was not a happy man. I did try to take a conciliatory approach, but he would have none of it, and my politeness was long at an end when he told me he wanted to take the cannons with him. I packed him into a litter and had him carried down to the port, where with great relief I saw him laid in a boat and pushed off to the Mede transport ship. He made some unpleasant threats, but I doubt he will have an opportunity to carry them out. He will face his emperor over the loss of an army when he reaches home. I do not expect to see him again and am glad of it.

  There were more meetings, confirming my impression that talking is the most important thing a king does. I had promised Hanaktia that her children would not lose Hanaktos if she fulfilled her bargain with me. I kept my word but settled one-third of the holdings on Berrone as a dowry and made my mother’s brother her guardian. That it didn’t please her mother was no concern of mine. My uncle will take care of Berrone’s best interests. I don’t trust her mother or brothers to do so.

  I went to see Nomenus the day I left. There were six cells in an outbuilding. The building was high in the middle with low eaves, and the doorways of the cells faced each other across a central breezeway. Frankly, it was more pig house than prison. The door to Nomenus’s cell was little higher than my waist and made of woven metal strips. Nomenus lay curled against it. He was asleep, which was not astonishing. He had no blanket, and I assumed it was too cold in the stone building to sleep at night.

  As I squatted beside the webwork of iron, he stirred and sat up. “You are triumphant,” he said. “I heard from the guards.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I’m glad,” he said grudgingly, tucking his fingers under his arms. “Not wholly glad, you understand…but glad.”

  I peered past him into the darkness.

  He said, “It is not so cramped farther back. I sit here because it is warmer.”

  I had come to see him because I thought that out of sight and out of mind might be a dangerous attitude to take. I wanted to have a very clear idea in my head of where I had put him.

  “Unlock this,” I said to the guard with me.

  Nomenus backed away from the door once it was open, and I got on my knees and crawled inside. The prison cell did open out; its roof was higher than in the cramped passageway by the door, and the floor in the rest of the cell had been dug out, so it was lower and Nomenus could stand upright. I sat in the tunnel that was the entryway and dangled my legs over the lip into the cell. The dirt having been dug away, what was left was a collection of boulders and the lumpy bedrock. There was no flat space outside of the entryway where I sat.

  I waved to Nomenus, and he settled uncomfortably on a rock. He had a huge bruise on his forehead that did not please me. He touched it gingerly and said, “It was no unkindness by your guards,” as if reading my mind. “I first came here in the dark, if you remember.”

  “I see.” I couldn’t think of what else I wanted to say. I watched him watching me. Finally I asked, “What are you thinking?”

  He swallowed. “Useless excuses that I am trying to keep unsaid.”

  I waited.

  After a moment he tossed up his hands, and to my intense discomfort, he started to cry. “You are king,” he said, his voice breaking. “What I did doesn’t matter very much now, does it? And what else could I do but be loyal to my lord? Is it my business whom my lord is loyal to?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No.” He pushed himself farther back and drew his legs up to be wrapped in the curl of his arms. He rubbed his face against his arms. “I wanted to be on the winning side, and I thought I was.”

  He was either a flawed but fundamentally decent man or a very convincing actor, or possibly, he was both.

  “Please,” he said, with obvious reluctance. “I hadn’t meant to ask, but, is it…forever?” His tears had made streaks through the dirt on his face.

  I said, “No. It isn’t forever, but it’s going to be some time.”

  He nodded.

  “When I have other things dealt with, I will deal with
you,” I promised him.

  Later, as I climbed onto my horse’s back and rode for the capital, his last words were still in my ears. His cell had already been locked behind me, and he hadn’t been talking to me. He was praying to the gods, I think, when he whispered, “Don’t forget me. Please, don’t forget me.”

  I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table.

  I left the city of Sounis almost immediately because I had backed Brimedius into a corner, and he had admitted both that he had held my mother and sisters and that they had subsequently disappeared. He admitted that he had no idea where they were. Clearly, he expected to be held responsible for their deaths. I did not relieve him of his fears, and wouldn’t until I had seen my mother and sisters with my own eyes.

  I was anxious to get to Eddis. In this, my father was my greatest ally, putting his foot down when the magus suggested I should travel with all my Eddisians and Attolians at a snail’s pace. I took a guard and a change of clothes and left the rest to travel at the speed of armies and gastropods. We changed horses frequently and arrived in Eddis almost as quickly as any royal messenger. I didn’t question for a minute that it was my desire for haste that moved us, not until we arrived in the great court of the Eddisian palace.

  My father dropped from his horse almost before the animal had stopped moving and strode, oblivious, through six layers of a ceremonial reception, to take my mother in his arms. I stared, remembering his words after we’d escaped Hanaktos. As I watched him lift her off the ground, watched her wrap her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder, it was apparent that I had misunderstood what he meant when he said that only I was “important.”