The Queen of Attolia (7 page)

“So what’s happening now?”

“Sounis wants Eddis and Attolia both. I offered him a chance to help me, but he’s choosing instead to join Attolia, although he hasn’t committed himself yet. She’s going to try to bring an army up the pass when the weather breaks. It will be slow, and most of the losses will be hers; there’s no room for her to maneuver. Should she get to the main fortifications, Sounis will bring his army up the other side of the pass. He wants to know that the defenses on his side of the Seperchia won’t be reinforced before he attacks. We’ve evacuated the people from the coastal mountains and moved the livestock over the bridge to this part of the country. We’re up to our eyeballs in sheep right now. If we don’t start slaughtering them soon, they’ll have grazed out the pastures. The silver mines have been packed with explosives that can be detonated if we’re going to lose them.

“Trade has been suspended through the pass. I did that,” said Eddis. “I thought that I might as well do it before one of the lowlanders did. Goods are being moved by ship through the coastal islands. There has been an unsurprising increase in piracy,” she said dryly.

“Can we stop the Attolian army?” Eugenides asked.

“No,” said Eddis bleakly. She ran one hand through her hair. “Not without throwing our entire army down the pass. We’d stop her, but we’d be defenseless on every other front, and that’s what Sounis is waiting for.”

“When do you expect the army?”

“Attolia’s army is loyal and competent, but she has to supply it somehow, and that’s slowing her down. That and a long winter. The snows still have the main pass closed, and after the thaw the tributaries down to the Seperchia will keep the roads impassable. We usually spend weeks or more on springtime repairs before the pass is opened. Obviously we won’t be doing repairs this year.”

“When?”

“The middle of our spring, if we’re lucky.”

“And what are your plans?”

Eddis looked grim. “To abandon the country west of the Seperchia: the coastal mountains and the silver mines. We can hold the entrance to these interior valleys. We have enough grain to get us through next winter.”

“And then?”

“We hope that Sounis and Attolia bring each other
enough grief to reduce their interest in Eddis. Please gods, they can’t maintain an alliance long, and one of them may be willing to break off and ally with us before we starve.”

“And if they remain allied with each other?”

“Then we surrender, Eugenides, and I am the queen that gets deposed. Attolia would probably take the coastal mountains and silver mines. Sounis would have the Hephestial Valley and the iron mines, unless he tries to grab the whole. At any rate, you could be a former queen’s Thief yet. Now I have to go speak to Xenophon. He’s been waiting for me.”

“Yes,” said Eugenides. “Go talk to Xenophon, by all means.” He went back into his bedroom and shut the door.

That night, after a day of staring into the flames of his fire, Eugenides left his room and wandered the deserted hallways of the palace. He was thinking. Absentmindedly he passed familiar things: a panel that opened into a passage behind the queen’s chambers, a storeroom with a tiny window from which he could reach the equally tiny window of his cousin Phrinidias’s dressing room, a useful hiding place behind a twisting staircase.

The palace slept at this time of the night, and he’d always felt these hours belonged to him alone, so he was surprised, when he turned into a passageway that
led to a staircase up to the roof, to find a guard at the end of it. He forced himself to continue down the passageway. There was no reason to turn back just because he’d been seen. He reached the doorway to the staircase, and the guard shifted his weight in order to stand squarely in the middle of it.

“I’m going to the roof,” Eugenides explained, puzzled.

“No, sir,” said the guard.

“What do you mean, ‘no, sir’?” said Eugenides. “Why not?”

“I have my orders, sir.”

“What, that no one is allowed on the roof?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir, no one is allowed on the roof, or no, those aren’t your orders?”

“No, those aren’t my orders, sir.”

“Well, then, what are your orders, and stop calling me sir.” No one had ever called him sir before he’d stolen Hamiathes’s Gift, but since then it had been cropping up quite often. He didn’t like it.

“My orders are not to allow you onto the roof, sir.”

The Thief stared, dumbfounded.

“Eugenides.”

He turned. The queen stood at the end of the passageway, flanked by two more soldiers and a third man.

“What do you mean, I’m not allowed on the roof?” said Eugenides, outraged.

The queen walked toward him. The third man, Eugenides saw, was one of Galen’s assistants. He glanced from the assistant back to his queen.

“You have someone watching my door,” he accused her.

She looked uncomfortable. Eugenides turned to the guard beside him and cursed. He turned back to the queen, still cursing. The soldiers on either side of her looked shocked.

“You think I’m going to throw myself off the roof?” he asked.

She did. The people in his family tended to die in falls. His mother, even his grandfather. When the palsy in his hands had grown so severe that he could no longer feed himself, he’d been unable to climb to the roof, and he’d tumbled over the railing at the top of one of the back staircases. It hadn’t been a hard fall, but enough to kill an old man.

“You started a war without mentioning it,” Eugenides snarled. “You have my rooms watched, and I’m not
allowed
on the roof. What do I find out next?” He pushed past her and the soldiers. He walked backward away from her. “Tell me you’ve enrolled me as an apprentice bookkeeper. You bought a lovely house for me in the suburbs. You have a marriage arranged with a nice girl who doesn’t mind
cripples!”
he shouted. He had reached the corner and disappeared from sight still shouting. He was making enough noise to wake every sleeper in that wing
of the palace, and he didn’t care. “I can’t wait to hear!” He spaced his last words out and finally was finished. There was no sound, not even that of his receding footsteps.

The queen sighed and dismissed the soldiers who’d accompanied her.

“Shall I go back to watching his door, Your Majesty?” Galen’s assistant asked.

“Yes,” she answered heavily. “Watch him as carefully as you can.”

Returning to her room, she sighed again. The accusation about the arranged marriage had been a home shot. It was a good thing Eugenides hadn’t realized it yet.

In the morning the magus knocked at the library door and entered without waiting for an invitation. Eugenides, still in the clothes he’d worn the day before, looked up once from the fireplace and then ignored him.

“My king sent me, you understand,” the magus said, sitting in the armchair opposite the Thief. “Our ambassador has reported that you were no longer a threat, but Sounis is wary when you are involved. He wanted me to gather a second opinion.”

Eugenides ignored him.

“I have to go. I can hardly stay longer. My king isn’t going to declare war until Attolia has the pass under her control. The narrow ascent will make the attack costly for her, but Eddis has only a small army to hold the pass. She has no real defenses outside the natural
terrain. When her army is gone, my king will attack from Sounis. If Eddis surrendered…it would be better. You can see that, can’t you, Gen?”

Eugenides didn’t look at him and didn’t speak, not even to point out to the magus that only very close friends were entitled to call him by the shortened form of his name.

“Gen, sitting in here isn’t going to help anything. You can talk sense to Eddis. Maybe you aren’t a Thief anymore, but you could still do something.”

Eugenides lifted his head, but only to look into the middle distance beyond the walls of the library. The magus sighed and stood up. He patted Eugenides once on the shoulder and left without seeing how the Thief’s eyes narrowed, watching him go.

He returned to his king in Sounis and told him he thought the Thief was no longer a danger to anyone, except perhaps himself. The best course of action was to join Attolia and seize Eddis. Sounis was delighted.

He was in his private dining room, reclining on a couch as he picked at a late meal. As the magus talked, servants moved in and out carrying trays with tempting delicacies, most of which the king ate. The trays were offered to the magus, and he selected enough to avoid offense.

“And when Eddis has surrendered, you think we will be able to hold all of it?” the king asked.

“Attolia’s army will be wasted trying to secure the pass. You should be able to take it from her fairly easily. By then she will be deeply enmeshed with the Mede, trying to hold some power in her own country. Neither of them will have time to squabble over Eddis. If you secure Eddis quickly, you will be strong enough to outface the Mede when he tries to expand beyond Attolia.”

“But our chances to take Attolia will be gone.”

“For the present, yes.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘the present’?” the king asked.

“Perhaps the next hundred years,” the magus answered, and the king snorted in irritation.

“I thought you might mean that. Let’s keep our predictions to my lifetime, shall we?”

“There’s little chance the Medes would lose their grip on Attolia within your lifetime, Your Majesty,” the magus said stiffly. “Remember that Eddis will not be assimilated immediately. It will take at least a year to reorganize the various ministries under Sounisian control.”

The king flashed his magus a dark look. “Let us hope my lifetime is not so brief,” he said.

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” the magus murmured. “The reorganization of the government will be only one of many steps. Eddis has a superb fighting force. You will want to integrate it into your own forces without diminishing its worth.”

“Eddis should have married me,” Sounis said
abruptly. “Do you think she still might?”

“It would be in our interests, Sire.”

“Ours, but not hers?”

“Eddis has been independent for a long time, Your Majesty. They will not give up easily.”

“They will give up in the end, though,” said Sounis confidently, picking over the tray beside him for the pastry of his choice.

“Oh, yes,” the magus agreed, as confident. “They are a small country with few resources outside their mines and their trees. Sounis will have them in the end.” When the king dismissed him, he returned to his study to make careful notes for the history he was writing of the war the Sounisians had fought centuries before while struggling to stay free of the powerful invaders from the Peninsula. He hoped to use the knowledge he acquired in the exercise to aid him in a more successful defense against the Mede.

“What of the Thief?” the queen of Attolia asked. Her ambassador and his staff were still confined to their rooms in Eddis’s palace, but there were those willing to pass information to Attolia. Their reports were unreliable, but they were all her secretary had to answer his queen’s persistent questions.

“No one has seen the Thief,” the secretary of the archives told her. “He no longer comes down to dinner.”

“Reassuring news,” the queen said.

“Surely he is in no way a threat, Your Majesty?” Relius asked, puzzled by her continued interest in the crippled Thief of Eddis.

“I don’t think he is a threat, Relius, but he bears watching. To be certain that he was no threat, I should have had both his hands cut off and probably his feet, too.” She thought for a moment about the words of the Thief’s grandfather and corrected herself. “To be entirely certain, I should have hanged him, but the traditional punishment seems to have been effective so far. Do watch him. If there’s any sign that he has come out of his internal exile, I want to know about it.”

Relius’s spies continued to report that the Thief had retreated to his rooms and admitted no one, not even his father. His queen never attempted a visit. She never spoke of him, and evidently no one else at court dared to. Those who needed the books or scrolls from the library made their selections and carried them away to read elsewhere. There were not many scholars in Eddis.

Galen alone forced himself on Eugenides. He had a key to the door connecting Eugenides’s retreat to the library, and Eugenides could hardly barricade himself in. Galen, however, was not one of Relius’s informants. Relius knew that he left increasing amounts of lethium for the Thief, and that was all. Not even the servants, leaving food in the library and returning to collect empty trays, saw Eugenides.

He remained in his rooms as the winter eased and the spring came.

Snow gradually turned to rain in the mountains, and twisting ropes of solid ice melted into eager streams of bone-chilling water that hurried down the mountain slopes toward their elder sister, the Seperchia River. In the pass that the Seperchia cut between the Hephestial Mountains and the coastal range, the streams were forced into narrow ditches and crossed the roadway there in stone-sided culverts. A temporary dam of branches in one culvert caused the water to back and deepen. When a stone shifted in its bed, the swirling water ate at the ground behind it. No one reset the stone, no one prevented the damage from spreading. The ground collapsed; stone and bank were washed away, with more stones following, knocked loose and dragged along by the flood.

Elsewhere Eddis’s royal engineers diverted the water more deliberately, eroding years of careful work that had gone into maintaining the road that ran from Attolia’s capital, through Eddis, to the capital city of Sounis, carrying most of the trade between the three countries. In some places whole sections of the road disappeared in heaving muddy landslides, and the engineers, torn between satisfaction and anguish, reported to the queen that no army would reach the heights of the pass quickly.

S
PRING CAME EARLIER ON THE
coast than it did in the mountains, and Sounis’s summer was already near when the king’s magus woke one morning in the last hour before dawn with his ears ringing to find his room awash in moonlight. There was a sound like thunder still lingering in the air, and he left his bed to look out the window.

“There isn’t much to see from here,” said a voice behind him. “You need a view of the harbor.”

The magus turned to look for the Thief of Eddis and saw a shadow standing in a corner out of the moonlight.

“Eugenides,” he said. He had recognized the voice.

“Yes.”

“What have you done?”

“Not much yet,” answered the Thief from the darkness. “I remain fairly limited in my physical activities.” He held up his right arm, and the magus started before
realizing that the hand he saw had to be a wooden one, concealed by a glove.

Another booming explosion filled the air, and the magus turned back to the window but could see only a glare reflecting on the whitewashed walls of the buildings below.

“I had to send someone else to light the fuses,” Eugenides said behind him.

“Fuses?” asked the magus, with a sick feeling.

“In the powder magazines of your warships,” Eugenides explained.

“Powder magazines?”

“You sound like the chorus in a play,” said Eugenides.

“And the play is a tragedy, I suppose?”

“A farce,” Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced.

“How many?” he asked.

“How many of your ships are burning? Four,” said Eugenides. “Five if the
Eleutheria
catches when the
Hesperides
burns. She probably will.”

“The
Principia?”
The
Principia
was the largest ship in the navy. She carried more guns than two of the smaller ships put together.

“Oh, yes,” said Eugenides, “she’s definitely gone.”

The magus looked out again at the flickering reflections from the fires as his king’s navy burned in the harbor.

“The sailors are all ashore for the Navy Festival,” he said.

“Celebrating their naval superiority and control over most of the islands in the middle sea,” agreed Eugenides. “Sounis outdid himself this year with the free wine.”

“Surely there was a guard on the ships, though,” protested the magus.

“We put on our pretty Sounisian uniforms and paddled out there in a shore boat and told them they were relieved from duty by order of the king. Or rather, my loyal assistants did. I’m not much use in a rowboat these days.”

The magus dropped his head into his hands. “We have no navy,” he said. It was an exaggeration, but painfully close to the truth. His Majesty’s best warships had collected in the harbor at Sounis for the yearly festival. Attolia had still not reached the top of the pass, Eddis’s soldiers fought bitterly, and Sounis had wanted to fortify his citizens for the war ahead.

“You said I should do something.” Eugenides smiled in the dark, twisting the knife of his revenge a little deeper into the magus.

“I did?”

“As you were leaving, after your extremely edifying visit in the spring. You said, ‘You could still do something.’ Your exact words.”

“I meant talk your queen into surrendering,
not
destroy our navy in its own harbor!”
the magus shouted.

The shadowy form of Eugenides held one finger to its lips. “Shh,” he said.

“And my king?” the magus asked more quietly. “What have you done to my king?”

“He’s as safe in his bed as he thinks he is. Although he’s probably out of bed by now. We don’t have much time.”

“Time for what?” the magus asked.

“I didn’t come to Sounis to blow up His Majesty’s warships. I told you someone else had to do that.”

“What did you come for if not to murder my king?”

“I came to steal his magus.”

“You can’t,” said the magus in question.

“I can steal anything,” Eugenides corrected him. “Even with one hand.” He took a step forward into the moonlight and waggled his fingers. The smile on his face made the magus feel worse, not better. “You shouldn’t let the king choose your apprentices. Your most recent student, as we speak, is betraying your plans for the price of a good cloak. I would have given him more if he’d had the sense to ask for it.”

“My plans?” said the magus, beginning to wonder if he was still asleep. The scene in the moonlit bedchamber had all the discontinuity of a dream.

“Your plans to blow up the king’s navy.”

“Aaah,” said the magus, catching on, “I’m working for Eddis?”

“Oh, gods, no. You’re working for Attolia. You have been all along. Poor Ambiades found out, and that’s why you got rid of him. Pol, too.”

“Not even Sounis would believe that,” the magus protested.

“He will for long enough,” said Eugenides. “Think of it as stealing not you but the king’s faith in you.”

“And what happens to me without the king’s faith?”

“If you’re smart, you leave Sounis,” said Eugenides. “Quickly.”

He waited while the magus thought. They both knew that Sounis was afraid of his advisor’s power, that he chose poor apprentices for the magus to keep that power from growing, and that the king’s heir had been sent to a teacher on the island Letnos to keep him far from the magus’s influence.

They left the megaron through one of its smaller courtyards. The magus had a shoulder bag with three manuscripts inside, his silver comb, his razor, and his telescope, which he’d carried down to his room earlier in the evening after stargazing from the megaron’s roof. Eugenides wouldn’t let him go to his study and wouldn’t let him carry any clothes.

“My history of the Invasion,” he had protested. “It’s in my study.”

“You want people to think that you’re going down to the harbor, not running for your life,” Eugenides had told him. “Hurry, and you’ll live to rewrite it.”

Dressed as an apprentice, he walked behind the magus, keeping his wooden hand close to his side, and none of the guards looked twice at either of them. Once in the narrow streets outside the megaron, Eugenides led the way, hurrying through the old city and then down through the new city by back streets. He detoured into a quiet cul-de-sac where he’d left a bag hidden behind a stairway. Inside were two faded gray overshirts. He handed one to the magus and pulled the other over his head.

Crowds got thicker as they approached the harbor. Only the most dedicated revelers had been in the streets when the explosions began, but sailors sleeping on the floors of wineshops had dragged themselves out and were making their way, with the rest of the curious populace, down to the docks. Caught in the unexpected pedestrian traffic were the large wagons that moved through the city in the darkest hours of the night. They were forbidden to block the traffic during daylight hours. Dawn was approaching, and their drivers cursed as the horses moved a step at a time toward the market gate out of the city. The huge animals were normally placid, but the shouting, milling crowds unsettled them, and they jerked in their harnesses and their neighing rose above the sounds of people in the streets.

Pulling the magus by the material of his cloak, Eugenides worked his way along the line of wagons. He had almost reached the market gate itself when he
found the wagon he was looking for and swung himself up onto the back of it. He seemed to the magus to move as easily with one hand as he had with two. He turned to help the magus as one of the men already sitting on the wagon bed spoke.

“That was a near thing,” the man said as the wagon cleared the last of the congestion and picked up speed, rumbling through the torchlit tunnel under the city’s wall. “I see you collected your prize.”

“I did indeed,” said Eugenides.

The wagon was only a few miles outside the city when it left the main road and bumped down narrower tracks to a farmhouse and a stable. Waiting by the stable were saddled horses, one for each of the occupants of the cart, excepting the magus and Eugenides.

Eugenides stood, with the magus beside him, as the horses were mounted. Each of the riders nodded once to him as they rode away.

Then the riders were gone. Only Eugenides and the magus were left, and the man quietly unharnessing the cart horses. The farmhouse beside them was dark, the yard was quiet. The sky was pink and blue with the dawn, and the air was still. One of the horses sighed and stamped one huge hoof in the dust. The Thief disappeared into the stable through the open double doors and reappeared a few moments later, having removed the false hand and replaced it with a hook. He was
stooped over the crosstree of a sleek messenger’s chariot that he handled easily, even with one hand. He saw the magus staring and smiled.

“You see how well planned this adventure is,” he said. “I arrange not only a cart but a chariot as well. Timos will drive us.”

Timos led the cart horses into the stable and reappeared with a matched pair of racing horses. They were beautiful animals, graceful and excited in the morning air. Eugenides stepped back to give them plenty of room while Timos backed them to the chariot and began to fix their traces. When Timos was done and had climbed into the chariot, Eugenides stepped up as well and waved for the magus to join him.

The messenger’s chariot was light and well balanced. The magus, stepping onto the woven leather flooring, felt it give under his feet. He braced himself, as he saw Eugenides was doing, and held on very tightly as the horses jumped forward and the chariot whirled around the corner of the farmhouse and back down the rutted tracks to the main road. Once on the main road, Timos let the horses choose their pace, and fields, farmhouses, olive groves, whole villages passed in a jostled blur. The horses never slowed until the sun was high overhead and Timos pulled them up at an inn. New horses were hitched into place while the three travelers stood by the chariot waiting. These, too, moved like the wind until Timos again pulled up at another inn.

There’d been no chance to ask questions when the horses were changed, and talking was out of the question in the jolting chariot.

“We’ll eat and then go,” Eugenides said, indicating a table under a tree by the inn. The magus moved agreeably, but very slowly, toward the shade.

“Tired?” Eugenides asked.

“Old,” the magus answered. “Too old to be dragged out of my home by the machinations of someone I thought was a friend.”

Eugenides stopped to look over his shoulder. “Who told Sounis that now was the time to take Eddis? Who told him to ally first with Attolia to conquer us? He’d be stomping around in Attolia’s grain fields right now if it weren’t for you, and you know it.”

“True,” the magus admitted mournfully.

“It would serve you right if I dragged you off to Eddis and locked you into a cell for the next fifty years.”

The magus settled onto a bench and rested his head in his hands. “Whether I spend the rest of my life in comfort in Eddis or in jail won’t be historically significant.”

“If all you cared about was historical significance, you could have stayed in bed until the king’s guard came for you.”

The magus had been disposed to save his skin, but he knew there were greater things at stake. “Eugenides,
if Sounis held Eddis, he could stop the Mede expansion and be prepared if an internal war ever arose in Attolia to drive them out. If he can’t unite at least Sounis and Eddis, all three of these countries will be divided and swallowed in a historical eye blink. Even you can see that.”

“One thing I see,” Eugenides said, “is that everybody is always willing to throw someone else’s country to the dogs. I don’t have any desire to be overrun by the Medes, but I don’t look forward to being overrun by Sounis either. And you don’t need to worry about political naïveté. I would have much preferred to slit Sounis’s throat while he slept, but his heir is hardly ready to inherit the kingdom, and we can’t have a civil war in Sounis for the Mede to step in and resolve, can we? Our horses are ready.” Hooking a bag that lay on the table, he held it in the air and dropped several small loaves of bread into it, then started across the courtyard to the chariot.

“Gen.” The magus, still sitting on the bench, called him back.

Eugenides waited, looking at him over one shoulder.

“You’ve become quite ruthless in your old age,” said the magus.

“I have.”

If the magus was surprised when they turned off the road toward the main pass and raced inland, he didn’t
have the breath to ask any questions. He waited until the horses slowed and stopped on a curving stretch of empty road.

“Where are we going?”

“You are headed for a nice hunting lodge on the coastal side of the pass. I haven’t left my rooms for weeks, so it would be awkward if I were seen riding up the pass with you. I’ll go on foot from here and up the Oster path and then come down into the capital from the backcountry with fewer people to see me.”

“If I am seen, there is no difficulty?”

“We’re hoping you won’t be seen, and if seen, not recognized. I’m a little more easy to distinguish, and we won’t rely on luck to keep me from being noticed.”

The magus looked up at the mountain and back at Eugenides.

“I made it down,” the Thief said. “We’ll see if I can get back up.”

“There must be an easier way,” said the magus. “Not that I personally would be unhappy to see you reduced to pulp on a rock pile at the base of a cliff,” he added.

Eugenides smiled at the gibe, the first real smile the magus had seen from him.

“There are many easier ways, but not if I’m going to be home in a reasonable time. Enjoy the lodge. You’ll have a guard, but they’ve been told to be pleasant to you. You are an honored guest,” Eugenides said, stepping away from the chariot and nodding to the driver.

“For how long?” the magus asked as the driver turned the chariot in the narrow roadway.

Eugenides held up his arms in an elaborate shrug as the chariot jolted away.

When Attolia learned that Sounis’s ships had been sunk in their harbor, she sent first for her master of spies.

There were rumors that the sabotage had been performed by a group of men dressed as Sounisian sailors returning to their ships to relieve the officers standing watch. They’d boarded the ships easily, and their access to the powder rooms had been simple. Still the queen wanted to know about the saboteurs. Had one been missing a hand?