The King of Attolia (20 page)

Teleus, who had faced his failures and his death and the death of his friend and accepted his own salvation at the hand of a man he despised, ran out of the strength to accept any more. He contradicted the king. “Her Majesty has condemned him.”

Eugenides, wounded and tired and surrounded by the walls and the stench of the prison where he had lost his hand, responded, not mocking but snarling, “Am I king?”

The way a crack in the face of a dam widens with accelerating speed, letting more and more water
surge through, Teleus’s voice rose with every word until he was shouting loud enough to be heard across a parade ground, the deep profundo painful in the small cell. “Do you think that matters?” he bellowed. “Do you really imagine it is your orders taken here?”

What else he shouted was lost, its meaning obliterated as the king shouted back, equally impassioned and incomprehensible, their words ricocheting against the walls and clashing into meaningless noise that made Costis long to cover his ears. If Teleus swelled with rage, the king burned with it. No matter that Teleus was nearly a head taller than the king, if Teleus meant to overwhelm him with his physical presence, he failed. Like a feral cat against a barnyard dog, the king stood his ground, and the two shouted until Teleus caught sight of the Secretary of the Archives. Relius had turned his head away, trying hopelessly to shut out the sound. Abruptly Teleus fell silent, letting the king’s last words ring uncontested.

“I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT!”

The prison keeper chose an inopportune moment to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king’s eyes narrowed while the prison keeper’s widened. Then the angry flush in the king’s cheeks faded away. He let the queen’s message drop from his hand, his face as white as the paper it was written on. He reached for the chair, and
his hook banged awkwardly over the top of it. He was swaying as he turned to catch his balance with his remaining hand. Philologos was nearest and raised his hands to help, but backed away. They waited. The king held the chair, stared into invisible space, and slowly his color came back. He started to speak twice, and stopped. He experimented with a small breath, then took a deeper one, and finally spoke without turning his head.

“I don’t care whose orders you think you are following, Captain, but you will see that Relius is moved to the palace infirmary and some physician, other than the butcher down here, treats him. Get Petrus. I will take your squad with me. You may keep mine. Send Costis to his bed before he falls over.”

He waited to see if Teleus was going to argue.

It was Relius who spoke from where he lay, his voice thready but defiant.

“You cannot buy my loyalty.”

The king made a noise too harsh to be a laugh. He stepped around the chair, and holding his side with his left arm, he leaned close to the secretary. “You said no one down here was brave.” He lifted his hook near Relius’s face. Relius closed his eyes tightly, and the king ruefully withdrew it. Painfully he crouched down until his knees were on the filthy floor and one elbow was supporting him on the bench. He lifted his hand away from his side, lifted it to Relius’s face, brushed the sticking hair
off his forehead, and said, speaking very gently, so that a man exhausted and in pain could understand, “You are pardoned, Relius, because I want you to be. Not because I want your loyalty.” He waited while the words sank in. “You can retire to a farm in the Gede Valley and keep goats, and be loyal to whomever you want. I don’t care.

“You are pardoned. Do you understand?”

Relius’s head nodded a fraction. Eugenides brushed his hand across the secretary’s forehead one more time. His words were still gentle, but he smiled as he said, “Don’t let Petrus put in too many stitches. They hurt like hell.”

He got to his feet slowly, but he didn’t make a sound. His attendants twitched, but didn’t offer to assist. The king stepped across the cell toward the door, his left leg moving slower than the right, making his steps uneven, his left arm pressed against his side. As he passed Teleus, he didn’t look at him.

“Her Majesty charged me with your safe return to bed,” Teleus said stiffly.

“I am going directly there. When you have seen Relius to a comfortable bed, you may tell Her Majesty so.”

When the king was gone, the prison keeper returned, creeping back. Teleus sent for something to carry Relius on. “Carry him where?” the keeper asked. He’d heard every word from where he’d stood in the hallway. He didn’t need to ask.

“Never mind,” said Teleus curtly. He crossed to Relius’s side. “Are your ribs broken?” he asked.

“Nothing but the hand, I think,” Relius whispered.

Teleus leaned over to lift the secretary’s head. His strong fingers cradled his friend gently while he pulled the cloak away. He used the cloak as a wrapping. “Get that damned chain off,” he said, and the keeper hurried to the task. When it was done, Teleus lifted his friend himself. Holding him in his arms, he carried him out of the cell. The guard trailed behind him.

“You can’t carry him all the way to the infirmary,” the prison keeper called.

“He can hand him to me,” said a guard as he was leaving.

“And me,” said another as he went through the door, leaving the keeper alone in the cell.

“Your Majesty,” Hilarion wailed, sounding more like Philologos.

“I lied.” The king interrupted without lifting his head and without pausing as he continued painfully up the stairs.

With no choice, the attendants followed. They had been left behind at the landing when they had stepped off the stairs, mistakenly heading in the direction of the royal apartments.

The top of the staircase let out onto the walks
around the roof of the palace, near the Comemnus tower. All of the towers around the palace were named. The Comemnus was taller than the rest of the roof by only a single story. It had been added to the palace by the current queen’s grandfather in a day of flamboyant architecture and was made of two colors of stone, speckled like a lattice and faced with decorative brickwork. The king paused as if admiring it, then went up the decorative brickwork as if it were a staircase and disappeared over the edge of the roof.

Consternated, the attendants stared at one another. After silent prodding Philologos called, “Your Majesty?” but there was no answer.

Hilarion put his hands to the brickwork and cautiously began to climb, not sure how he would continue when his path took him over the edge of the wall and out above empty space. He didn’t find out. He’d gone no more than a few careful steps when the king’s voice came over the edge of the tower roof.

“I will have you granched,” he said quietly.

Not wanting to end his life hanging impaled on stakes, Hilarion stepped hastily back down.

It was more than an hour before the king came down, and Relius had long been in his bed in the infirmary before his attendants and guard returned the king to the royal apartments.

Weaving with fatigue, dismissed by Teleus when they were halfway to the infirmary, Costis returned to his room, freed himself of belt and breastplate, and fell, otherwise fully dressed, onto the bed.

T
HE
long summer’s day was ending. The sky was still bright, but the sun was gone. The last of the swallows were flicking across the open spaces between the buildings and the first bats could be seen flicking with them when Dite left the walled city of Attolia and made his way through the open streets to the docks where a ship was awaiting him. If he’d imagined going off alone, with just his bag on his shoulder and some of the king’s money in his pocket, there were obvious complications to this plan. He needed to take his music and his instruments and had had to hire one of the palace boys to carry them. When the boy saw the number of cases, he doubled his price and went out to fetch a handcart. Dite’s friends had helped him pack all afternoon, insuring that it took much longer than necessary and that he had to put in a number of useless but appreciated last-minute gifts. His friends walked with him as he followed the handcart.

They were very merry, all of them. The house of Erondites might be tumbling to destruction, but they saw cause for celebration. Dite was going to the court of Ferria to be music master. Ferria—where they were translating the great works from the ancient world and reading them aloud in the plazas, where the artists were changing the world of painting overnight, where the wealthy patrons of the city demonstrated their status by keeping able-bodied men to do nothing all day and most of the night but make music.

They followed him onto the ship and helped him stow his possessions in his tiny cabin. Then they stood about on the deck admiring the sky, the ship, the crew, the bay. Dite pulled at one young man’s sleeve and drew him aside. He handed him two letters and a heavy purse.

“Will you deliver these for me, Kos? I couldn’t do it myself. The purse and the letter with it are for my mother.”

“God of wealth, Dite, where did you get this much? It isn’t the king’s silver, is it?”

Dite admitted that it was. “I kept some of it,” he said, “but I wanted my mother to have the rest. She might need it.”

“If your father decides he needs a younger wife. I understand. What’s the other letter?”

“That’s for Sejanus. If the king allows it, will you
deliver it? I tried to visit him, and they wouldn’t let me. No one is to speak to him.”

Kos agreed. The captain of the ship finally came to put off anyone who didn’t intend to sail for the Peninsula. The ship set out toward Thegmis, and the dark came down.

Inside the walled city, in the walled palace—under it, where it stank and there was no air except what came in, as if by mistake, through tiny openings into the rare light well—the dark hardly mattered. The only light all day had come from burning lamps outside the cell. Sejanus sat with his back against the rough stones of the wall. He was fortunate. He was privileged. He had a mattress on his stone bed; he had a window, no bigger than his face and barred, that connected to an air shaft, like a chimney, that went to the surface. He wasn’t chained. From time to time he walked over and pulled himself up on the bars so that he could put his face close and suck a breath of air not soggy with the smells of the prison.

When the prison keeper brought him food, he asked, he begged, for news of his brother, but the man wouldn’t speak. He left the food and went away.

The Baron Erondites, in his villa surrounded by quiet fields and the occasional sound of the animals in the stable and barn, ate his dinner with absentminded
pleasure, unaware of the messenger riding toward him on a fast horse. The night grew older, the dark cooled and blanketed the noises of the farm and the city alike. The Baron Erondites went to his bed, satisfied with his day. In the city, the palace grew quiet. Sejanus slept at last, as did Dite, rocked by the waves of the wine-dark sea.

In the palace infirmary, the moon shone through the arched windows. The lamp beside the only occupied bed burned with a tiny flame, and the dark gathered in the corners of the room and the recesses of the high ceilings. Relius was awake. He had heard the door on the far side of the infirmary open and close again, and he watched as the king crossed the large room toward him. His steps made no more sound than the moonlight falling through the windows, nor did the stool scrape against the floor as he settled onto it and hooked his ankle around one of its three legs. He might have been a dream, and Relius was not sure he was not.

Relius cleared his throat and whispered, “I had heard that you moved through the palace at night unattended.”

“In the past, perhaps,” the king admitted. “But not tonight.” Lifting his head, with effort, from the pillow, Relius could make out figures in the gloom on the far side of the room.

“My punishment,” said the king, “for walking in the gardens when I knew they hadn’t been searched. I have promised to keep them with me.”

Relius said nothing.

“I’ll keep the promise until I know I can get away with breaking it,” said the king. “It may be some time. She was”—he searched for a word, looked as if he might be dismissing
enraged, livid, furious
, and said—“not pleased.”

Relius still said nothing. He was waiting.

The king knew. “It occurred to you some time ago that this would be a fine revenge.” He lifted an arm to wave at the empty room around them. “One night here on clean sheets in the warmth of the brazier with a lamp beside you to chase the horrors away and then, in the morning, back to the cold and dark of one of those little rooms under the palace.”

It was as if the king pulled the thoughts out of Relius’s head on a string.

Relius had to try twice to get words out. “Is that what this is?” he whispered. He shifted his head on the pillow, searching for an answer in the king’s expression.

“No.”

Relius still stared without blinking. “Oh, gods,” he said, and closed his eyes. He seemed to shrink beneath the bedcover.

The king agreed with what Relius left unsaid. “It is exactly what I would tell you, whether it was true or not. There is nothing I can say to keep you from lying here all night anticipating the worst. Even if you are not hauled away in the morning, you will only worry that
the prison guard will be here in the afternoon, or the late watches of the next night or the next, and maybe, after enough nights have passed, you might begin to think you were safe all along. But there are hours and days and weeks of suffering between now and that point, aren’t there?” His voice was quiet.

“Should I beg again for your mercy?” Relius asked, looking away.

“You should believe me,” said the king more forcefully. “But you won’t. Would you believe the queen? Shall I bring her here to tell you it isn’t all a cruel trick?”

Relius twisted to face the king in astonishment and in horror.

“No!” The protest was surprisingly robust.

“Why not?”

“I failed her.”

“You won’t even ask?”

“I will never—” speaking so forcibly he was reminded of his pain and his vulnerability. He broke off.

“I thought so,” said the king. “I left her to sleep and brought you this instead. She wrote it out earlier.”

Eugenides lifted a roll of paper in his hand. He offered it to Relius. “You hold the bottom,” he said. He laid the roll across Relius’s chest. One of Relius’s hands was wrapped in bandages, but he used the other to pinch the edge of the scrolled paper as the king lifted. Once it was open, the king squeezed the scroll at the top, keeping it open while he folded it and laid it on the
edge of the bed. He pushed the cuff on his other arm along the fold to make a gentle crease.

He held it up again, so that Relius could see the words as he read them aloud. “I, Attolia Irene, here pardon my Secretary of the Archives, Relius, for his crimes and his failures, because of his many services to me and for the love I bear him.”

Relius swallowed. Eugenides released the paper and straightened out the fold. It rolled back up.

“For the love she bears you, Relius.”

“It’s paper,” said Relius, blinking back tears. “Put it over the bedside lamp and it will be ash.”

Eugenides shook his head, but Relius’s eyes were closed again, and he didn’t see. “Relius,” Eugenides commanded, and the Secretary of the Archives opened his eyes. “It’s her word. If I drop it into a brazier, the paper will burn, but her word is not so easily consumed. She wouldn’t lie to you.”

Relius shook his head. “You are the king,” he said.

It was his last possible denial. The king countered, “If she thought that I, as king, intended to overrule the pardon, she would never have written this. It would be a lie, and she wouldn’t lie to you,” he repeated.

“No,” Relius said shakily, “she…wouldn’t.” His breath of relief ended with a gasp.

“I am sorry I couldn’t come sooner, Relius. I did not mean to leave you alone here so long.”

The king sat beside the secretary, neither of them
speaking, until Relius was asleep. When the king got up, he stood a moment, hunched over, before he straightened with an almost inaudible sigh.

In the morning, Costis skipped sword training, had a leisurely bath in the bathhouse, and went directly to breakfast in the mess hall. He picked a place by himself, but he was not alone for long. A group of other guards instantly rose and settled around him like a flock of birds. Their haste made Costis uncomfortable, but there was no way to leave without giving offense.

They wanted news and Costis was their most likely source.

“We heard that the king has had Lieutenant Sejanus arrested on some trumped-up charges.” To them, he was still the loyal lieutenant.

“They weren’t trumped up,” Costis said, before he recalled that the charges were exactly that.

“He confessed,” Costis said, but the guards had seen him waver. They looked at him so skeptically that Costis added firmly, “Sejanus attempted to kill the king.”

“Don’t we wish he’d succeeded,” said Domisidon, a leader in the Third Century.

Costis winced. He would have agreed wholeheartedly just a few days before. Or perhaps not. He had raced to the king in the gardens before he knew that Eugenides was more than he appeared and before he
knew that the queen loved him. What had shifted his opinion of the king? It might have been Costis’s suspicions of Sejanus, but he thought it was more likely the king’s tears, and the realization that the king, no matter how obnoxious, suffered just like any other man, from teasing without mercy, from isolation, from homesickness.

Exis was down the table, watching Costis with lifted eyebrows. Costis shrugged. “I think it is worth remembering that Sejanus is a true son of Baron Erondites.”

The guards understood that. Whatever their thoughts about the king, they knew the danger that Erondites posed for their queen. “At least now we know why the queen has been pretending her affection for the king. She’s made him her puppet,” Exis said dryly.

“He’s no one’s puppet,” Costis warned, but they laughed.

“You sound like his attendants,” said Domisidon. “No one believes them either.”

“Tell us about the attack in the garden,” Exis asked. “Only you and Teleus witnessed it, and the captain won’t talk.”

Costis delayed. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to talk about the events in the garden. “I slept most of the afternoon yesterday. Tell me your news first.”

He learned that the king hadn’t gone directly to bed as he’d promised.

“What was he doing on top of Comemnus tower?” Costis asked.

“Admiring the view,” someone said.

Costis recognized one of Teleus’s squad from the prison cell the day before. “Did you see him?” Costis asked, too quickly. “Which way was he looking?”

The guard eyed him strangely. “I couldn’t see. What difference does it make?”

“Never mind,” said Costis hastily. “I’m glad you eventually got him back to his room.”

“Her Majesty’s rooms. It seems he is staying there.”

Another guard leaned into the conversation. “I heard that he wanted to leave again, but the queen’s attendants put lethium in his wine.”

“I heard they put it in his food. He refused the wine and fell asleep anyway.”

The guards laughed unkindly.

“So he lied,” said Costis with a forced laugh. “It’s what he does best.”

“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you?” said the man on his left.

“Tell us about the fight,” someone else said, and others around the table echoed. “Tell us about the fight with the assassins.”

Glancing up, Costis saw that Aristogiton had come to join them as well, a wine cup in his hand and his
mouth full of bread. Costis smiled in delight. “I thought you were confined to quarters?”

Aris smiled back, his cheeks bumpy. “The queen reinstated me yesterday morning, as a squad leader still in the upper cohort, no less, at the same time that she reinstated Teleus as captain and threw out Enkelis.”

“She threw out Enkelis?”

But this was old news to the guard. They wanted to hear about the assassination attempt, and they wouldn’t be put off.

“Aristogiton says he arrived too late to see anything but the bodies on the ground. Tell us what really happened, Costis.”

Costis reluctantly told them what he had seen of the assassination attempt, that there were three men, that the king had taken the long knife away from one of them and used it to cut the throat of another. He’d then thrown the same knife at the last assassin as he tried to escape.

“He wasn’t armed himself?”

“How did he get the knife away, then?”

Costis shrugged. It hadn’t been a training demonstration. There hadn’t been time to observe carefully while he was running flat out toward the king. “It happened too fast.”

“I see,” said the man on his left.

He clearly saw something Costis didn’t, by the tone of his voice, but there was no time for more conversation. A
barracks boy was at his elbow with a message. Costis was commanded to appear in the queen’s guardroom immediately. He got to his feet. “I have to go.” He excused himself, not wanting to give offense.

“Of course you do,” said someone down the table into his wine cup.

Costis hesitated. Whatever they were thinking, the men at the table clearly shared the same thoughts. Costis couldn’t stay to press the matter. He would ask Aris about it later.