Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  For me to suffer the dull needle poison

  That comes from a point

  Pushed through hides

  Tougher than mine.

  “Ready?” he asked, and I nodded. He stuck the needle in, and I shrieked.

  “Shh,” he said. “I don’t want mama lion coming back just yet.”

  So I was quiet and held very still as he stitched and recited. He paused after each line to pull the thread through, tightening his stitch, then set the next as he moved to the next line. There were only a few longer pauses in his steady pace when he was biting off the thread. I focused on his words and on my breath, exhaling in the pauses, holding it during the stitching, wondering how many times the song had been recited in scenes similar to this one, only probably absent the lion cubs I could still hear meeping outside.

  When he neared the end of his second recitation, he lifted his head up from where he’d been hunched over my scalp in order to look me in the face. “I’m not finished,” he said apologetically. “Just a little more. Can you recite it from the beginning?” So I did, fumbling for the words at his prompting until, at last, he was done.

  He recited one last couplet like a benediction: “Stitched is the seam, whole is the skin, let it hold bad vapors out and blood in.” Then he said, “I’ll get you a drink.”

  He brought a blanket as well and draped it over me. I was glad, as I was shivering—more from distress than cold. I pinched it curiously between my fingers.

  “A gift from the Namreen. Our bags must be nearly to Perf by now.”

  Once again, we had the clothes we wore and little else. At least he’d kept his wallet this time.

  “Hungry?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Rest, then,” said the Attolian. He pulled his blade out of its sheath and put it with his dagger close to the entrance and then lay down beside them. I wasn’t sure I could sleep, but at least the blanket was comforting. The pain in my head throbbed, but it grew no worse. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that all was well.

  I woke with my heart in my mouth. It was dark, and the lioness was screaming. Scrambling toward the back of the cave, I had only a sense of shapes and hasty movements as the Attolian frantically stabbed again and again. I could make out no more, until the lioness pulled her head back and allowed a little of the moonlight into the cave. She reached in, one paw at a time, and the Attolian struck at it with his dagger. I could hear her low, rumbling snarl just outside the cave.

  Inside, I could hear the Attolian panting.

  “Are you hurt?” I whispered.

  “I’m fine,” he said curtly. The lioness had obviously been more than he had expected.

  We crouched, listening, as the lioness paced back and forth outside, still snarling. Twice more she tried to enter, but halfheartedly. The Attolian slashed at her face, and eventually she retreated, complaining, down the hillside.

  “Try to get some more sleep,” said the Attolian, as if that were a perfectly reasonable suggestion. I reached for the blanket I had abandoned. Pulling it toward me, I pushed myself up against the back wall of the cave as far as I could get from the entrance.

  I was surprised when I opened my eyes to find that enough time had passed that it was light enough for me to see the Attolian curled up asleep. When I stirred, his eyes opened. Crouching over, he crossed to my side and bent over my head, sucking his teeth in concern. I reached a hand up to touch the sticky mess in my hair. I must have hit my head against the ceiling without realizing.

  “Leave it,” said the Attolian. “Only one or two of the stitches have gone.”

  He rifled through the Namreen’s saddlebag and produced some dried meat and another waterskin, which we shared. I was tired and still rattled by the midnight arrival of the rightful owner of our lodgings, and the meat seemed more effort than it was worth. Still, the Attolian insisted, so I ate. I saw that he had two lines harrowed into his forearm, sticking out either end of an awkwardly tied bandage. I should have offered to stitch it for him, as he had stitched for me. I didn’t have his experience and would only have made a mess of it, but I still felt guilty.

  After I ate, the Attolian lay down to sleep again. “We’ll hear the kittens if she comes back,” he reassured me, before closing his eyes.

  So I sat up, careful not to bump my head this time, and listened like a mouse in a mousehole for any scrabbling sound that might be the lioness and her offspring returning. I realized that I was hot, still tightly wrapped in my blanket, and threw it off. The day stretched long and painfully ahead.

  It must have been after noon when we heard voices and a dog barking. The Attolian was instantly alert, and we both leaned close to the opening of the cave as they came nearer. I knew one of the voices—it belonged to a shepherd from the caravan. He kept the dog to help him manage his flock. I didn’t recognize the voice of the other man, but it wasn’t one of Roamanj’s guards, I was sure. I wondered if Roamanj had stopped the caravan to organize a hunt, but these two men seemed to be on their own. The shepherd was insisting his dog would find us, but the other man thought they were on the wrong trail.

  “We haven’t seen a single track in more than a mile; the dog is hunting caggi.”

  “Look at him. He’s on a trail or he wouldn’t be this eager.” Indeed, we could hear the rising excitement of the dog. I looked to the Attolian, but he only put a finger to his lips.

  The dog was barking now, louder and more frantic by the moment.

  “Yeah, but trail of what? I’m telling you, he’s hunting caggi. He’s wasting our time following the trail of some—”

  The man had been raising his voice to be heard over the dog until he broke off. I was afraid of what he had seen to stop so abruptly. Our footprints? Some other sign of our presence? We were trapped in the cave—escape would be impossible were we discovered. Then we heard the snarl directly over our heads and saw the lioness’s shadow flick across the ground outside. The Attolian and I nearly knocked our heads together trying to see more. The men screamed, the dog barked, the lioness howled. The dog must have held her off for a moment because we could hear the men’s shouts continuing as they ran downhill, followed by the yelping dog, perhaps followed by the lioness as well, we had no way to know. The noise they made diminished in the distance while I stared accusingly at the Attolian.

  “They won’t come back,” he pointed out. “They’ll assume the dog was following the scent of the lion, not us, and if they do think we were up here, they’ll assume she has done for us and they can give up.” He actually looked pleased with himself.

  I longed to point out to him that there’d been a lion sitting right above us and we hadn’t known it, but I was much too well behaved. I curled up on the blanket with my back to him and pretended to sleep.

  When evening came, I turned up my nose at the little bit of food left from the Namreen’s packs. I drank some water and only realized when it was gone that I’d had all that was left. The Attolian waved away my apologies, and I was too sick to care if he was angry.

  “It’s just the wound fever,” he said as he covered me in a blanket I didn’t want. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” I fell into a nightmare-filled sleep of lions sent by my master to drag me to an afterlife I knew would be even worse than life itself.

  When I awoke in the morning, I did feel better, my fever had broken, and the waterskins were full. The insane Attolian had been out to refill them. I told myself that I was lucky not to have been awakened by the lioness eating me and fell asleep again. A little later the Attolian checked his work on my head and nodded, pleased. He brought me water to drink and asked if I could eat something.

  I nodded, and he gave me what I thought was probably the last of the dried meat. I held it in my mouth to soften before I swallowed it in a painful lump.

  The Attolian went to where the ceiling of the cave was highest and he could sit upright with his feet splayed in front of him. He had his knife in his lap, though there’d been no sign of the lioness
since the day before.

  “I think she’s moved to another den,” the Attolian said quietly. “I’ll go out later in the day and see if I can get us more to eat, but for now, it’s best to keep out of sight of lions and any slave trackers, too.”

  “Do you think Roamanj’s guards are out there?”

  The Attolian shook his head. “If they were hunting us, one of them would have been with the dog. Roamanj won’t hold up his caravan. He’ll press on to Perf and report this business to the authorities there and let them deal with it. I think those two Namreen were alone, so we have some time to get clear of here.”

  That left only the lioness to consider.

  The Attolian sat. I lay on the ground. Time passed very slowly. The Attolian tapped his toes restlessly and said, “So, there was a scholar once who got sick and called the doctor. The doctor wanted a fee for his services, and the scholar promised him he’d pay when he got better. Later the scholar’s wife wanted to know why he was drinking so much wine when he was still sick. He said, ‘Do you want me to get better and have to pay the doctor?’”

  I smiled politely.

  He tried again. “There was a young scholar once at the school of Etitus who was ashamed of his beardless state. One day one of the older scholars told him, ‘Your beard is coming in,’ so the scholar ran to the front gate of the school to wait for it. Another scholar, walking by, asked what he was waiting for. ‘My beard! I was told it was coming in!’ ‘What an idiot,’ said the other scholar. ‘This is why people think we are such fools. How do you know it isn’t coming in the back gate?’”

  That was funnier, but I still couldn’t produce more than a smile.

  “Maybe you know a joke?” the Attolian asked. “A funny story?”

  “Only Senabid jokes,” I said, dismissing those with a shake of my head.

  At the hottest part of the day, when the lioness was most likely to be sleeping somewhere in a patch of shade, I watched how the Attolian managed his exit from the cave. He’d pulled a lace from one of the Namreen’s packs and tied a scrap of fabric to the end of it. He flipped the fabric out into the dirt outside the cave and pulled the string, making the scrap dance across the ground. He did this for some time, waiting for any lurking cat to jump on the scrap, and only when there was no sign of the lioness or her cubs did he carefully exit the cave himself. He must have set snares when he was out earlier because he came back fairly quickly, and I heard him outside starting a fire and cooking his catch. He rolled a rock into the cave and crawled in himself, holding his knife at an angle so that the meat he had speared on it wouldn’t fall off.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It looks like caggi,” I said. “Like a large rat that lives in the desert.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s edible?”

  I shrugged. I’d never heard of anyone eating caggi.

  “It’s caggi or nothing,” the Attolian said. He put it on the stone and cut it into small pieces, then fed me one piece at a time. Never had I been so carefully served. If there was a little sand in my meal, I wasn’t going to complain.

  The Attolian made a face, though, when his teeth crunched on the grit. “Attolians who don’t like my king,” he said, “put sand in his food. I don’t know how he puts up with it.” I couldn’t imagine. I was surprised they hadn’t put something worse than sand in what he ate.

  The Attolian smiled down at his food, lost in his memories for a moment. “When he gets fed up, he climbs up on the roofs or the tops of the walls. Sometimes he gets drunk first.” That made me think the Attolians might be rid of him soon enough and poisoning their unwanted king was unnecessary.

  “That chain around your neck,” said the Attolian, abandoning his happy thoughts of the interloper king falling to his death to focus on the present. “I thought we might pound the links between two stones.”

  We could do that, but it wasn’t going to hide the source of our gold. I said, “The flattened pieces of gold would still be suspicious if we tried to trade them for anything.”

  “What if we claimed to have found it out here in the hills? On a body?”

  I shook my head. “The only safe thing a man could do if he found such a thing would be to take it to his local imperial justicer to deliver it back to its rightful owner, who might, or might not, send a reward. A lot of trouble, maybe for nothing. To have it and not have returned it makes a man liable—not just for the gold but for the value of the slave he is judged to have stolen.”

  “There must be a black market,” he said.

  “Yes, but difficult to find,” I said. “And very dangerous if you ask the wrong person.”

  The Attolian grunted in disappointment and said we should plan to move on the next day. “It smells even worse in here than it did before.”

  I agreed, envying him his time outside—except for the lion.

  When the sun was high, we left the den. I lay on my back with my arms reaching out of the cave, and the Attolian dragged me outside to a rocky patch where I could stand without leaving any prints. He’d already piled the Namreen’s saddlebags there, and we shrugged them over our shoulders and then checked to see that the long scuff mark we’d left in the soft dirt had covered all of the Attolian’s remaining footprints.

  The Attolian said, “With luck, the lioness will come back and leave a few more prints on top. Anyone who sees this will think she dragged you in.”

  I looked away.

  “So, so, so,” he said, conceding that he had doubts as well. “We’ll hope they’ll never see this at all.”

  As carefully as possible, we walked down from the hills back toward the road, stepping from rock to rock and then wiping away any prints we could not avoid leaving. If they brought a dog, of course, it wouldn’t matter, but we thought that the men from the caravan had probably lost faith in their tracking animal. By the time Roamanj made it to Perf to report what had happened and imperial authorities of some kind returned to this spot to look for us, our scent would have faded.

  We reached the empty road and waited there in a sheltered spot until dark before crossing in case someone was watching. While the Attolian hadn’t seen any signs of searchers, he was very cautious. The moon was nearly full and waxing, and we would walk through most of the night, navigating by the visible stars. We would hunker down out of sight just before the sun came up. We were headed overland toward Traba. The Attolian, who had demonstrated he could knock down a caggi from a surprising distance with a stone and a flick of his wrist, would feed us. In Traba, we could pick up the road again and follow it to Koadester.

  “With luck,” said the Attolian, “we will be well ahead of any pursuit. They will be slow to track us overland, and we will be moving fast once we are on the road.”

  For the time being, our waterskins were full and we each carried a set of the Namreen’s saddlebags stuffed with their extra clothes and a blanket apiece. Their distinctive vests and our own blood-covered shirts we had left in the lion’s den.

  Even in my best health, I did not think I could have matched the Attolian for traveling strength, and I watched him closely for signs of impatience as I picked my way slowly behind him.

  Encouraged when I saw none, I asked, “When we get to Traba, what then?”

  “I have a little coin left from your purse and more from the Namreen,” he said over his shoulder. “If I have not found a means to make the money to pay for lodging and better food than rodents, we are going to have to find a way to sell that necklace.”

  As the moonlight was disappearing, the Attolian picked a spot to rest. We couldn’t afford a fire, so we just sat in awkward silence until the Attolian said, “So, you don’t like Senabid jokes.”

  The jokes about Senabid and his master are not the sort of thing a slave tells to a free man, and I was an idiot for mentioning them in the first place. I blame it on the fever.

  “What about a story from Attolia?” I asked.

  “No, I’m no storyteller. Can you tell me mor
e about Immakuk and Ennikar?”

  “If you like. First, tell me—how did you come to Ianna-Ir?”

  He misunderstood. With a tilt of his head and a wince, he said, “I punched the king in the face.”

  Aghast, I had no idea how to respond. That wasn’t what I had been asking about at all. I’d only been trying to decide which story to tell him. I assumed this meant the Attolian was no favorite after all and the king had tasked him with my theft as punishment.

  “He was more kind to me than I deserved and he forgave me,” the Attolian said.

  Gods above and below. People died—gruesomely—for even thinking of harm to the emperor. Certainly he would never forgive such an offense. I couldn’t imagine why the Attolian king would do so.

  But the Attolian hadn’t finished. “Because he was so kind, people thought I was a favorite, and because of that, he thought it safer to send me here.”

  At this point, I should have chalked it all up to foreign customs I couldn’t possibly understand, but I was intensely curious. If the king had forgiven him for assault, then he was a favorite, wasn’t he? What greater favor could the king have shown him? Why was his life in danger?

  “How safer?” I asked.

  “Well, the Namreen aren’t dropping roof tiles on my head or trying to stab me in the back.”

  That I understood. It was what came of having a weak king. If the Thief was going to let people get away with punching him in the face, it was no wonder he had no control of his court. He couldn’t keep his favorite safe and had to send him away. I understood, but I wasn’t sure if the Attolian did, because he seemed chagrined for himself, not his king.

  I cleared my throat. “I—I was actually asking what route you took to Ianna-Ir. Did you come from Zabrisa to Menle and down the river?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No. We sailed to Hylas and went overland on the Three Cities trade road to the Southern Ocean. Then took a ship to the delta and another one upriver to the capital.”

  “So, you crossed the Isthmus,” I said. “You know—the narrow stretch of land between the Southern Ocean and the Middle Sea where the Three Cities lie.” This was everyday geography—any child in the empire would know it. His eyebrows dropped, and I was afraid I had offended him. Hastily I said, “I was going to tell you the story of Unse-Sek, the monster of the Isthmus.” I tapped my lip and began.