The King of Attolia (4 page)

“Shall we begin with the first exercise?”

Costis obediently assumed the stance for the simple practice of thrust and parry in prime. He knew that the king was not a soldier, but he was surprised that Eugenides had not at least mastered the basics with a
sword. Perhaps he had lost his skill along with his right hand, but Costis thought the king should have adapted to fighting with his left. There had been time to learn since the queen had caught him traipsing through her palace and cut off his hand. Back when he was the Thief of Eddis, before he’d stolen the throne of Attolia as well as its queen.

Teleus dropped back and pretended not to watch. The rest of the Guard did the same. The flesh crawled between Costis’s shoulder blades.

“Your guard is low,” Eugenides said calmly, and Costis took his attention off the guards around him and looked at the king. Eugenides put one eyebrow up. Costis had to pull his chin down to stop his head from shaking in disgust. He wasn’t a very talented swordsman, and he didn’t have the experience of the veterans around him, but he was a damned long way further down the road than first exercises in prime.

Eugenides read his mind and smiled wickedly. Costis clenched his teeth, adjusted his sword, and fixed his gaze on the embroidered front of the king’s tunic.

The king didn’t move. Costis stood with his sword extended while the king stood with his own sword still tucked into his armpit. Costis’s arm and shoulder began to burn. The wooden practice sword was weighted to feel as much like a real sword as possible, and it was no joke to hold it extended as the moment stretched on,
especially as his muscles were still stiff from hours of immobility the day before.

Finally the king stepped into position. He knocked Costis’s sword aside and completed the thrust, stopping just a bit before Costis’s breastbone.

“Again?” he said.

Costis returned to position. And so it went. The king may not have had the skill to engage in a pretend battle and give Costis the beating everyone in the Guard assumed he had coming, but the king could and did commence exercise after exercise only to leave Costis immobile in the middle of it, straining his muscles to keep his body motionless and to conceal the effort immobility demanded. He was determined not to let the effort show. He concentrated on the point of the sword held out in front of him and willed it to be still, as the least waver at its point would reveal his strain.

The king, after his first mocking smile, addressed himself to the practice as if it held his whole attention. His concentration was worse than the mockery had been. If he had laughed, Costis could have been angry and his anger would have given him strength, but Eugenides was almost preternatural in his calmness as he moved his sword for a thrust, back to a ready position, to the block, marked by the quiet
tack
as the swords hit, to the thrust, and to ready again.
Tack
, thrust, ready,
tack
, thrust, ready.

Costis wanted to throw back his head and howl. This was the king the gods had given Attolia?

At last, the men around them began to break off their exercise and move away. Costis expected every repetition to be the last, but the king seemed oblivious and only remarked, “Again?” after each.

The other soldiers had left. The only people on the open ground between the palace walls and the barracks were Costis, the king, Teleus, and the king’s attendants lounging near the entryway. One of the king’s attendants approached. He was taller than the king, about as tall as Costis, expensively dressed and heavily built.

“Your Majesty?” he said, in cool, arrogant tones.

Eugenides lowered his sword and stepped back from Costis to look around at the empty field. He looked up at the position of the sun.

“I see the day is passing,” he said mildly. “Thank you, Costis.” He nodded dismissal. Costis stepped back and almost stumbled. The king saw the hesitation and raised an eyebrow. Costis had no doubt that his concern concealed malicious delight. He bowed and strode away. Behind him he heard the king speaking to Teleus, but he didn’t listen.

He went from the training ground to the mess hall, hesitating for a moment in the doorway. No one greeted him. No one even looked at him. He looked, but didn’t see Aristogiton. Costis hoped that it was
because he was on duty, but suspected Aris had avoided a situation where he must either throw in his lot with Costis or publicly ignore him. Costis headed toward the kitchen, and the line of men gathered there melted out of his way. He collected a bowl of ground cereal and a dish of yogurt and a handful of dried fruit. He sat at a long table at the side of the room.

He looked at the food and couldn’t bring himself to eat.

He was too proud to get up and leave.

A bowl dropped, not lightly, onto the table beside him. The wooden bowl hitting the wooden table announced like a knock on the temple door that someone had come to sit beside him.

“Aris, don’t be a fool.”

“Too late to change now,” said Aris as he stepped over the bench and sat beside Costis. He looked around the room, daring anyone to object. Instead, after a moment, one of the other squad captains, senior to both of them, stood up from his table and crossed the room to join them.

“It isn’t,” he said as he dropped onto the bench, “as if we weren’t, every one of us, happy to see him knocked flat on his back.”

One by one, the other squad leaders joined the group, and Costis passed from one kind of embarrassment to another, less painful but no less acute, as they teased him about his practice session with the king.
Costis put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands, pointedly ignoring the rest of the table, but knowing privately that the weak feeling in his knees was relief. He no longer had a squad, but he was still a member of the Guard, not a disgraced outcast.

The other squad leaders ate and moved on. Aris stayed a little longer. “You should eat,” he pointed out to Costis.

“I will,” Costis promised. He’d been too sick and then too embarrassed to get on with his breakfast. “Why do you think they did it?” he asked, grateful but puzzled to have been brought back from exile.

“They like you,” said Aris. “They respect you.”

“Why?” asked Costis, unaware that he might be admirable in any way.

Aris put his head in his hands, an image of despair at such naiveté. “That, Costis, is the difference between you and, say, someone like Lieutenant Enkelis. You didn’t think you deserved to be promoted after Thegmis; you said you were just doing your duty. Enkelis never lets a good job go by without taking credit for it. He wants to be captain someday, so he makes sure he is better than anyone else. You just want to be better, and that’s why everyone thought you’d make centurion and lieutenant and maybe captain, someday. They wanted you to be captain. They’ll never want Enkelis.” Aris drained his cup and stood. “I’m on duty soon. You should eat.”

Costis didn’t take his advice immediately. He was thinking. Too soon he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Wash and dress,” Teleus said. “The king wants to see you.”

Costis looked at him in bewilderment.

“Hurry,” Teleus prompted.

After one regretful look at his breakfast, for which he had finally acquired an appetite, Costis went. With Teleus standing there, he couldn’t even snatch a fig. He hurried to his room to collect his gear and carried it in his arms down the stairs and across the courtyard to the baths.

The Guard’s baths were in a building as big as one of the barracks. It had a domed top as elegant as anything designed for the patriarchs of the court, though its insides were fairly utilitarian. There was no time for the steam room and the strigil afterward. Costis dumped his clothes onto a bench and hurried to the tepidarium to scoop a bucket of hot water out and dumped it over his head. There was a hard lump of soap sitting in a stone dish that he used to scrub himself. There was no lather. Aris said that the lumps provided in the bathhouse weren’t soap at all, but stone, and that they cleaned by abrading the dirt from the skin, not soaping it away. He scooped more water out to rinse himself, and stepped back across the slate floors, careful that he didn’t slip.

A valet appeared with a scrap of cloth to dry him and
helped Costis into the clothes. Once the breastplate was buckled in place, the valet stepped back, and Costis shrugged his hands helplessly. “I haven’t got a coin. I’m sorry.” All of his money had disappeared. There would be no more until the next payday.

The valet waved a hand in forgiveness and Costis hurried away.

Teleus led the way up to the palace. Following his captain, Costis worried and wondered what the next stage of his fate might be. The captain had said only that the king wanted to see him and expected him at breakfast. Nervously, he followed Teleus through the many hallways and rooms of the palace, at first familiar then increasingly less so. As a member of the Eighth Century, Costis had never been in the inner palace. Some of the doorways were guarded, and at each, the guards saluted Teleus and he nodded as they passed. Finally they crossed a narrow courtyard and went through an arched tunnel that led to a terrace overlooking the queen’s garden. Waiting there were the queen’s attendants, a table laid with dishes and breakfast, and, sitting alone at the table, the queen.

She glanced up at Teleus, but didn’t speak. Teleus took a position near the entrance to the archway and waited. Costis did the same.

The king arrived, preceded by his own squad of soldiers and his attendants. His hair was damp and
unoiled. His skin looked freshly scrubbed. He noted Costis as he passed him and turned his head to give him a brief smile as if acknowledging a point that Costis had scored in arriving first.

“You’re late,” said Attolia to her husband.

“My apologies,” said the king. One of his attendants pulled out a chair for him and he sat at the table. The attendants bowed and withdrew, leaving the king and queen alone except for their guards.

“That waistband doesn’t go with that coat,” said the queen.

“As you have already noted, I was late.” Eugenides bent his head to look at his waist. His coat was yellow, and so was the waistband, but the shades were not the same. “My attendants have triumphed this morning in their quest to make me look foolish.”

“You are unhappy with your attendants,” the queen said. The flesh between Costis’s shoulders crawled at the implied fate of any man or woman who failed the queen’s expectations.

“Oh, no,” said the king. “There’s no need to boil them in oil. No doubt in time their taste will improve.”

“Perhaps if you did not order your clothes in colors that would suit a canary?”

The king tilted his head to one side and eyed her for a moment as if weighing his response. “You’re right,” he agreed placidly. “I should stick to an Eddisian tunic in black with black embroidery and shiny black boots. I
can powder my hair with gray like a Continental, and you can pretend you married my father.”

The queen waved at the guard around them, and the soldiers withdrew, out of hearing distance, but not before they heard the queen tell her king that his father at least had a sense of dignity.

“And he’s never late for breakfast,” observed the king, taking a bite of a pastry.

When breakfast was over, the king stepped around the table and bent to kiss his wife’s cheek. This assertion of ownership, the queen endured like stone. Costis was transfixed. He struggled to imagine her own mother kissing the queen and balked, seeing instead an adult Attolia somehow shrunk to the size of a child. Distracted by the image, he was late to realize that everyone on the terrace was looking at him. The king had motioned him to approach and waited with one eyebrow raised.

When Costis stepped forward, the king looked him carefully up and down. He leaned closer to peer at the buckles on Costis’s breastplate, while Costis counted back in his head the number of days it had been since he’d polished them. The king’s subsequent look of dissatisfaction left Costis certain that somewhere there was a buckle undone or an unburnished spot on his breastplate.

“I understand you are now an unassigned guard?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The king addressed his captain. “Is he going to dangle like a loose thread from your tidy schedule?”

“I am sure I can find a use for him, Your Majesty.”

“I have a place ready made,” said the king. “He can serve me.”

“The units that serve the king are fully made up, Your Majesty, but we could enlarge one unit if you like.”

“No, not in someone else’s squad.”

“You want him detached from the Guard?” Teleus was puzzled.

“I thought as…lieutenant.”

Teleus was stunned.

“Yes.” The king nodded his head with sudden decision. “I want him promoted to lieutenant-at-large, and I want him assigned to me. Every day from now until I dismiss him. Morning and afternoon. I will inform him if I want him with me in the evenings. He can begin now.”

“Costis has not been trained as a lieutenant,” Teleus protested politely. “He does not know the protocols for serving within the inner palace.”

“He can learn as he goes.” The king lifted the gun out of Costis’s hand. A lieutenant didn’t carry one. He passed it to Teleus to dispose of, and waved in dismissal.

When Teleus still stood, the king waved again, shooing him off like a trespassing pigeon. The captain bowed, cast a look at Costis full of dire warning, and retired.

“I believe he was instructing you not to disgrace yourself,” said the king, and then turned to his attendants. “Where are we going this morning?” he asked.

The day that followed took on the same nightmarish impossibility of the day before. Bewildered, Costis followed the king and his attendants and guards as they led the way through the convoluted passages of a palace pieced together by at least seven known architects over a span of uncounted years. He observed the king’s tutorial on olive production and taxation. When it was over, the king asked Costis whether he thought it was better to levy a tax per tree or try to estimate olive production year to year.