The King of Attolia (11 page)

He jumped when he heard the bolt shoot in the door. He hadn’t been aware that there was a bolt. Sejanus laughed at his surprise.

“He does that every night,” he said. “I think our little king doesn’t trust us. We have to knock like okloi at the temple in the morning and wait until he opens it for us.”

Attolia returned to her apartment and sent her attendants away. She sat at the window. There was a deliberate click of a door closing, but no other sound.

She thought of Relius. In the first year of her reign, when she was a young queen with nothing to guide her
but her wits and civil war on her hands, her guards had found Relius spying on her and dragged him out from under a wagon. Who was his master? they had asked, and he’d answered, No one. Entirely for himself, he had wanted a glimpse of the queen. Standing in his muddy clothes, the illegitimate son of a household steward, Relius had offered to serve her. He offered her everything she needed to know of her enemies. He had taught her the craft of manipulation and intrigue, teaching her to use men as tools, and as weapons, and to survive in a world where trust had no place. Never trust anyone, had been his first and most important lesson.

“Not even you?” she had laughed, back then when she had still laughed sometimes.

“Not even me,” he had answered her seriously.

Only through pain can you be sure of the truth, he had taught her, and she must have truth at any cost. Her nation depended on it.

She had to know the truth.

The silence around her was a gift, and she took refuge in it. For this brief time she did not need to move or speak, did not need to tease apart the truth from the lies of Relius’s betrayal, did not need to justify her action or her inaction. Her king found no such refuge in stillness. He preferred to pace. She had seen it often enough already, back and forth as
silent as a cat in a cage. But he could be still as well, as skillful in stifling movement as in moving, as silent as sunlight on stone. He knew that the stillness was as near as she could come to peace, and he offered it to her.

When Phresine knocked to say that it was time to dress for dinner, she waited for the click of the latch and then she called her attendants in.

When the hour was up, it was time for the king to dress for a state dinner, and Costis was dismissed. He marched back through the palace with the squad of guards also relieved from their duty. They had left the palace proper and were on the terrace, moving toward the stairs that led down toward the Guard’s compound, when they crossed the path of Baron Susa.

Costis knew him by sight, as he was baron over the land where Costis’s family farm was. He nodded at the baron politely and was surprised when the baron called him by name. Costis stopped. So did the squad.

“Perhaps you could send your men on,” suggested Susa. “I only want a moment of your time to chat with a fellow countryman.”

Reluctantly, Costis sent the men back to the barracks.

“So, Costis Ormentiedes,” said the baron, “you have become quite the confidant of our king, have you not?”

Costis wished he could call the men back. He was rattled by the fall of Relius. Their presence would have
deflected anything Susa wanted to say, but it was too late. Susa was waiting for an answer.

“No, sir. I wouldn’t say so, sir,” Costis said carefully. Just as Aris had been hesitant to cross Sejanus, Costis would be very careful not to offend Susa. As landowners, Costis’s family was not as vulnerable as Aris’s. Susa couldn’t raise the taxes on the land, or seize any of it, and an Attolian landowner, no matter how small his holding, held the rule of law on his own land, but Susa could still make things uncomfortable for the Ormentiedes.

“I understand that he has requested you for special service, even allowing you to attend him privately?”

“The king is—” Costis paused to look down at the ground, hoping that he radiated embarrassment. “The king is exercising his sense of humor, sir.”

“Ah?” prompted Susa.

“I’ve been doing nothing but basic exercises on the training ground since I…came to his attention.” Costis was afraid he might be overdoing the shamefaced act, so he lifted his head and pulled himself to something like attention, in the process managing to look even more harassed. “I am on the walls at night regularly, sir, and at the court in the afternoon. The extra watches are…”

“Capricious?” asked Susa.

Costis’s expression hardened. “I would never say so, sir.” To call the king capricious was a step too far even for Susa.

“And the private audience for a dishonored squad leader?”

“His Majesty chose to dismiss his attendants, and when they protested leaving him entirely alone, he selected me as a replacement. I don’t believe, sir, that that was a compliment to myself but rather a reflection of the king’s relative pleasure with his attendants, sir, which was at the time low.” Were there too many “sirs” in that answer? he wondered.

“I see,” said Susa. “Nonetheless, you have absorbed a certain amount of information you would be glad to relay, I am sure, Lieutenant.”

Costis hoped his expression didn’t give away his horror at the proposition. However the Undersecretary of Naval Provisions had gotten his information, more than just the king assumed it came from Costis, probably because of the scene he had made on the training ground. He wanted to turn on his heel and walk away, but he couldn’t. Neither, he knew, could he offer Susa what he wanted.

“Not much, really, sir,” said Costis. He remembered his audience with the queen. “Nothing beyond that he spends the time alone looking out the window.” He shrugged an apology for the insignificance of his information.

Susa’s eyebrows went up. He didn’t think it was insignificant. It was apparent Costis had revealed something very important indeed. “Thank you, Squad
Leader.” He offered a coin, which Costis took after a moment’s hesitation, not knowing how to refuse it, and then Susa went away.

Costis walked on through the palace and down to the Guard’s barracks, knowing himself entirely guilty of what the king had not condescended to accuse him of.

T
HE
stool hit the wall with a satisfying crash.

“I was going to sit on that,” Aris pointed out mildly. He was lying on the bed, where he had been waiting for Costis. “Anyway, I planned to sit there once you showed up. What has happened now?”

“Only that I have done something stupid. STUPID.”

“You told the king you aren’t a gossipmonger?”

“No,” said Costis. “I mean, yes, I told the king. That’s not the stupid thing I did.”

“You’re sure?”

Another time Costis might have laughed. “I told the king I would not sink so low that I would reveal private information about him.”

“And?”

“The queen summoned me at noon to ask what the king did when he was alone in his rooms.”

“Ah.”

“How could I not tell the queen anything she asked?”

“You are still here—and breathing—so I assume you did tell her?”

“She wanted to know if he did anything besides looking out the window the whole time. I said not that I knew of. I thought I wasn’t telling her anything new and I wasn’t refusing to answer her because I don’t know anything anyway.” He held up his hands, begging Aris to tell him this answer had not been unreasonable.

“So?” Aris was reserving his judgment. He knew that there was more coming.

“So Susa just asked me the same thing.”

“Ah.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Did you tell him?”

“I thought it was meaningless, only now I think it wasn’t. It was important. I just didn’t know it.”

“But you said the queen already knew.”

“No,” said Costis, “the queen
guessed
it. Then she asked me in a way that I would confirm it if it was true.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “I am so sick of people who all seem to be smarter than I am and know more than I do. I want to go back to the farm. These people make my family look easy to get along with.”

“Well, at least no one knows, this time,” said Aris. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Well, because I have to tell him, don’t I?”

Aristogiton didn’t agree. He and Costis argued back and forth as he tried to convince his friend not to expose himself to further difficulties. What difference, after all, could it make if the king spent time looking out the window? What of interest could he possibly be looking at?

Costis didn’t know and couldn’t guess. “But it is important, Aris. You have to see that. And if it’s important to the queen and to Susa, it means that it will be something used against him.”

“Then tell him that you told the queen. You can’t be blamed for that, and if Susa throws it in his face, the king will think it came from the queen. He’ll never learn otherwise.”

Costis shook his head. “If Susa is going to attack him, he should know.”

“Why?” demanded Aris. “You don’t care if he gets poisoned tomorrow.”

“I don’t care if he gets poisoned as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

Aris looked at him in speculation. “You do care if he gets poisoned,” he said.

Costis admitted the point with a sigh. “If he choked on a bone and died, I wouldn’t care. But I can’t…I sound like a sanctimonious old philosopher, but I can’t stand by and watch people get murdered, Aris. I never meant to have anything to do with people like this. I wanted to be a soldier.”

“You wanted to be Captain of the Guard someday,” observed Aris.

“That was before I realized what it meant.”

“So what do you want now?”

“I want to retrieve some grain of self-respect. That’s about the total of my ambition at this point. I’ll tell him about Susa and I’ll tell him about Sejanus while I’m at it, and maybe if I’m blessed by the gods, he’ll have me exiled to a nice penal colony in Thracia.”

Having decided to speak to the king, Costis had to wait for an opportunity. He didn’t dare speak out at sword practice in the morning. There were too many people nearby to overhear him. He meant to wait until the king next dismissed his attendants. He began to be afraid that the king had retreated to his rooms alone for the last time, especially as he had demonstrated his willingness to lock his attendants out of his room when he wanted his privacy. Moreover, in the process of winning over Erondites the Younger he seemed to have found a new means of arranging a little peace for himself. Between appointments, he sometimes walked in the garden. On days when the king might have the time free in his schedule, the gardens were emptied. The king could order the guards into position at various points and walk between them alone.

Every day Costis debated with himself whether he should speak to the king at their morning training, but
in an agony of indecision he held off. As he told Aris, it was no place for a private exchange. He could suggest to the king that he needed to speak to him alone, but he already knew, from his last attempt to address him during training, that the king wouldn’t cooperate. It was more likely he would turn the moment into a scene from a farce and draw the attention of everyone within hearing, perhaps alerting Sejanus in the process. Costis waited.

Ornon also waited, and worried. Relius had fallen. The Office of the Archives was in disarray. The king hardly spoke to his barons. He spent more and more time distancing himself from the court. He rarely addressed the queen in public, though Ornon was told Eugenides still claimed a proprietary kiss at breakfast.

“Your Majesty.” Sejanus had to repeat himself before the king finally called his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

“What?”

“I’m very sorry, Your Majesty, but the blue sash appears to have ink stains on it as well.”

“Never mind,” said the king. “Just bring me—”

Bring him what? Costis thought. If the king broke down and said, “Bring a sash, any sash,” the attendants would bring him one that didn’t match the style or color of his coat. If he came up with a particular sash,
they would claim again that it was stained with ink, or that it had been sent to be cleaned. This could continue all morning, and the king was late, with all his attendants standing around in poses of mock subservience, and Sejanus visibly smug.

“Bring me all the sashes that aren’t stained, dirty, or otherwise abused,” said the king wearily. “And I will pick one.”

It was a solution. The king seemed tired, not triumphant. The attendants excused themselves, calculating how much more time could be wasted fetching and delivering the sashes from the wardrobe, the least likely first, until almost every single sash the king owned was draped across the bed and hanging from the furniture around the room.

Finally the king was dressed and ready to leave. He and his entourage were on their way to the temple of Hephestia. There had been no morning training and would be no breakfast with the queen. This was a signal occasion when the king visited the new temple, still under construction on the acropolis above the palace. By all accounts, the last time Eugenides had addressed the Great Goddess, she’d answered by smashing windows all over the palace. The storm that day had probably been a coincidence, Costis thought, but it made a man think twice, and he hoped today’s visit provoked no such response.

They left the palace through the gate near the
stables and the kennels and proceeded up the Sacred Way on foot. The new temple to Hephestia was being constructed on what remained of the foundations of the old Megaron. The king and queen had been married here at a temporary altar. Since then, new courses had been laid to make the walls of a naos, provisionally roofed in canes. The rest of the foundation was open, as all that remained of the earlier building were the basal stones, in some places still covered by mosiacs in tessellated patterns. Resting on these were haphazard piles of stonework that would be used to enlarge the foundation before the pillars, lying in pieces nearby, were stepped. The king wove his way between the stonework piles, heading toward the door to the naos and a priestess who waited for him there.

“This is the end of your journey, Your Majesty.”

“I am seeking an answer from the Great Goddess and have come to speak with her Oracle.”

“She knows your question, and your answer.”

“I have not yet delivered it.” The king held up a folded paper in his hand.

“She knows it,” the priestess repeated.

The king tried to push past. “Then she can tell me the answer.”

The priestess held out an arm that stopped him in his tracks. “She will not.”

“Then I will ask the Great Goddess myself.”

“You may not.”

“You think to come between
me
and the Great Goddess?”

“No one of us can be separated from the Goddess,” said the priestess, but she still held up her arm. Costis wondered if the two would come to blows, and if they did, what was he supposed to do? Help the king violate a temple? Watch while the king was chucked off the temple foundation by the priestesses?

Luckily for him, a commanding voice came from the interior of the naos. The Oracle herself stepped from the darkness into the doorway. Hugely fat, she was wrapped in a peplos of livid green that seemed to glow with its own light against the dark interior behind her. Her meaty fingers twitched the paper out of the king’s hand. She opened it, and without reading it, without even looking at it, she tore it in half. Still cold, she handed one half back to the king.

Eugenides looked down at the paper in his hand. The men behind him craned to see it. There was nothing left but the signature of the king, written left-handed in square letters, ATTOLIS, at the bottom of the page.

“Your answer,” said the priestess.

The king crumpled the paper in his fist and threw it on the ground. Without a word, he stalked from the doorway, across the open foundation of the temple, and leapt across a construction ditch to firm ground without looking back. His guard and his attendants hastily
followed. Exchanging looks, rolling their eyes, and with shrugs, they had to break into a trot to catch up. It was clear that the Oracle could upset the king more in one morning than even Sejanus could in several months’ time. Eugenides never slowed and he never looked back all the way down the Sacred Way to the palace and from the gates of the palace to his apartment, where he arrived in such a fury that the guards stationed there actually jumped to attention.

In his guardroom, he turned at last to face his attendants and snarled at them, “Get out.”

Still surprised and puzzled by the scene at the temple, the attendants withdrew without argument. The king pointed at Costis and at the door to the passageway, then walked into the bedroom. Costis quietly closed the door to the passage, and followed the king to move the chair near the window. The king threw himself into the chair, and Costis backed out of the room.

In the guardroom, he stood by the door to the outside passage and waffled. It would take more nerve than he anticipated to take the step forward into the doorway and draw the king’s attention. The door was open. Costis had left it open the first time and the king hadn’t objected, so he assumed it should remain open. It would take three steps to reach it and clear his conscience.

He didn’t move. He reviewed his argument with Aristogiton, but still arrived at the same conclusion. If
he wanted to redeem himself, he needed to admit to the king what he had done. Then he reviewed just how much he wanted his self-respect. Too much, he finally decided, and stepped toward the doorway.

The king sat with his feet on the chair and his knees drawn up to his chest, looking over them and out the window. So motionless was he, and so silent the progress of his tears, that it was the space of a breath before Costis realized the king was crying. When he did, he stepped hastily back out of sight.

“What is it, Costis?” The king’s voice was quiet. He must have caught the movement from the corner of his eye.

Reluctantly, Costis stepped forward. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”

“All will be well, I am sure. Is there something you wanted to say?”

Costis looked up from the floor. All traces of the king’s tears were gone, so perfectly erased that Costis almost doubted that he had seen them at all.

“Uh—”

“You interrupted me so that you could say uh?”

Costis blurted out the words. “I told the queen that you sat here and looked out the window.”

The king continued to watch whatever held his attention outside. “She is your queen. You could hardly decline to answer her questions.”

“I also told the Baron Susa.”

The king turned away from the view. He was expressionless. Costis stammered an apology and an explanation. Helplessly he fumbled for the coin he had carried everywhere since that day and held it out to the king. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I didn’t do it for money, I didn’t mean to do it at all.”

The king turned back to the window.

Costis stood, his hand still out, the silver coin lying in his palm, waiting for the penal colony.

Finally the king spoke, very quietly. “I apologize, Costis. I’ve put you in an impossible situation. Why don’t you let my entourage back in, and you may go.”

“Go, Your Majesty? The guard doesn’t change until the end of the hour.”

Eugenides shook his head. “You may go now,” he said.

“What should I do with the coin?”

“Dedicate it. I am sure some god or priest will appreciate its value.”

Costis backed out of the door again. Numb, he admitted the king’s attendants and the guards.

“I’ve been dismissed,” he said to the squad leader. The squad leader nodded, and Costis stepped into the passage.

“What, Lieutenant? Are you going?” the guard there asked cheerfully.

“I’ve been dismissed.”

“An early day. Congratulations,” the guard said. Costis headed down the dim passage.

It wasn’t just an early day. The king was done with him. His stay in limbo was over. He told himself he should be happy, and he wondered why he didn’t feel more relieved. Maybe he was shaken by the king’s tears, but he didn’t want to think about those. He had cleared his conscience and hadn’t been sent to a penal colony; the future should look brighter. He wondered what the king found so interesting to look at out the window.