The King of Attolia Read online

  “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.

  “I don’t know, Your Majesty,” Costis answered.

  “Hmm,” said the king. “I thought you grew up on a farm?”

  The tutorial on olive production was followed by a lesson in Mede. As the king wandered around the room, obviously bored and unreluctant to show it, Costis tried to stay alert. The king seemed to know by divine inspiration when his attention wandered.

  “Costis. The word for death in Mede, I can’t remember it.”

  Costis racked his brain, searching that part of the mind that remembered the last few words it had heard without actually understanding them. “Shuut,” he said at last. Clearly annoyed, the king asked him another question and another until Costis couldn’t produce an answer, and then a few more questions after that. The conjugation of to hit, the word for traitor, the word for idiot.

  “Forgive me, Your Majesty. I didn’t hear that part of the lesson,” said Costis. None of those things had been mentioned by His Majesty’s tutors.

  “You might pay attention to what’s going on around you, instead of daydreaming. My life does depend on it, you know.”

  Costis thought perhaps he’d died and somehow crossed the river into hell without noticing the trip.

  At last, one of the attendants stepped forward to say that it was time for the king to return to his apartment to eat. The king’s instructors thanked the king with every appearance of sincerity.

  In the hallway, the king dropped back to walk behind his attendants and beside Costis.

  “So, Costis,” he said, “have you learned all you need to know of Mede?”

  “No, sir,” said Costis, judging that to be the safest answer.

  The king yawned, covering his mouth with his hand. “Me neither,” he said.

  They had reached a corner. The attendants who had been in front of them had politely slowed until the king was once more even with his retinue. Sejanus murmured a direction.

  The king looked around. “I thought it was that way.” He pointed.

  “No, Your Majesty,” the attendants patiently chorused.

  The entrance to the king’s apartments, like the queen’s, was always guarded. The king nodded at the guards and passed through the door from the corridor. Costis hesitated, unsure if he should wait in the hall or pass through himself. A hand between his shoulder blades impelled him forward. Through the door, he found a guardroom, elegantly paneled in wood, lit by deep windows in the far wall. It was the entrance room to the king’s private chambers, and it held more soldiers and one of Teleus’s lieutenants. Costis himself, he remembered with a shock, was also one of the captain’s lieutenants.

  The guards standing around the room at attention must moments before have been occupying the benches that lined the walls. The king waved, a gesture of simultaneous recognition and dismissal, and the guards settled from the rigor of attention to a slightly more relaxed but respectful posture. A guard opened a door to the king’s right, and he passed through, followed by his attendants. Costis knew from palace rumor and from Sejanus that the room beyond must be the king’s bedroom. There was no other anteroom.

  These were not the royal apartments with layers and layers of social defense, anterooms, audience rooms, and more anterooms, between the guardroom and the queen’s most private space. The queen had not vacated the king’s apartments, and Eugenides had evidently declined to move into what were traditionally the queen’s rooms. If he had, his rooms would have connected through interior doors to the king’s suite and nighttime traffic between the rooms would have been a matter for speculation and not public record. As it was, the king could not visit the queen without an embarrassing trek through a roomful of his guards and attendants, down a corridor, and along the same public path past the queen’s guards and her attendants. It was well known that this had never happened. The king rarely visited the queen’s apartments and only during the day. The queen had never been in these apartments.

  “You may go if you like, Costis,” the king called from the inner room. “But don’t be late getting back for the afternoon court.”

  The door closed and Costis was left standing. He looked helplessly at the lieutenant, who stared back with an appraising look. He looked over Costis’s shoulders at the veterans in the squad behind him. The hair on Costis’s neck crawled as the veterans offered their silent report. It may have been positive; the lieutenant smiled and told Costis that he was off duty.

  “Then I just leave?”

  “That is so. Be sure to get back in time to escort him from here to the afternoon court. I’ll make sure one of the men on duty in the afternoon tells you where to stand in the Audience Hall.”

  Only as Costis stepped into the passage outside the king’s apartment did he realize he had no idea how to get out of the palace. He looked over his shoulder at the guards outside the king’s door. They looked blandly back, and Costis wasn’t fool enough to ask directions. Taking a deep breath, he decided to retrace his steps to the main part of the palace. Once there he would be on familiar ground.

  He found that he had memorized most of the route. It twisted and turned so often that at last, curious at its convolutions, he stopped to explore a little in the passages around him. By happy chance, he found a wide corridor that led directly to the center of the palace. Relieved, he headed for the barracks to look for Teleus.

  He spent most of his precious time off duty searching for the Captain of the Guard without finding him. Giving up at last, he snatched some bread out of the mess hall and headed back to the king’s apartments, only to be stopped at the entrance he had chosen to the inner palace. No one had questioned him on the way out, but to readmit him, they demanded authorization. When he explained, they looked at him doubtfully, but sent word to the lieutenant assigned to the captain’s office. Teleus must have left instructions because the messenger came back with authority for Costis to pass, and the guards sent him on his way.

  By the time Costis finally reached the king’s apartments, he was late. There was no time to get instructions about where to stand. Costis had no sooner stepped into the guardroom than the king swept out and Costis had to follow.

  The afternoon court was held in the Audience Hall in the center of the palace. Costis had seen Attolia’s throne room before, but not often enough for it to have lost its effect on him. Eugenides didn’t seem to notice the mosaics or the towering columns several stories tall that supported the roof.

  The titular King of Attolia dropped onto the throne beside the queen’s and smiled at her. “It’s not my fault I am late,” he said with childish delight. “Costis didn’t come back after he ate. I waited and waited.”

  Attolia declined to respond. Costis, obeying the hissed instructions of a chamberlain and the helpful wave of one of the other guards, found a place to stand against th
e wall and watched the business of the state. The queen directed everything. No one addressed the king, and he never spoke. Costis’s interest waned, and he grew bored but was careful to keep the expression on his face attentive. The king didn’t bother. In fact, during one baron’s particularly drawn-out accountings of his tax payment, the king leaned his head back and closed his eyes, to all appearances asleep.

  Finally the court session drew to a close. Those who hadn’t been heard would have to come the next day. The king and queen rose. They were surrounded by their attendants and guards and escorted away. In the corridor, they paced along, side by side.

  “You can speak during a court session,” the queen pointed out, in a dry voice.

  “I can,” agreed the king. “I thought about telling Artadorus he needed a haircut.”

  “That would have been impressive, not only speaking, but speaking in your sleep.”

  “I was listening,” the king said, aggrieved. “I closed my eyes to listen better.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “That’s why I was listening so closely. I may have to ask the baron to repeat some parts of his report on his grain tax.”

  “I am sure you can arrange an appointment.”

  “I am sure I can, too.”

  Dismissed at last, Costis returned to the barracks. As exhausted as if he’d spent the entire day in a battle, he staggered upstairs and along the narrow hall to his tiny but private quarters. The leather curtain that served as a door was pulled back. The room was empty, stripped of every single possession; even the thin mattress on the bed was bare, his blankets missing. Feeling utterly defeated, Costis sank down on the three-legged stool the king had occupied the day before and wondered what he was supposed to do next.

  He hadn’t sat there long when a barracks boy arrived.

  “Captain’s orders are that you are to attend him immediately.”

  Costis thanked him and turned his steps wearily back down the stairs and across the grounds to the collection of rooms that included Teleus’s office and his quarters. A narrow staircase climbed an outside wall to a small landing and a door. Costis knocked.