Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Finally, not far away, I heard a whistle and answered with one of my own. The Attolian appeared at the lip above me with one of the waterskins full again.

  “I found a water seller,” he said.

  The road was north of us, and we could have walked parallel to it for some time before it curved south to cross our path. As it was, the Attolian led me to it fairly quickly, and we followed it all day. There were a number of towns between Perf and Traba, and the road had more travelers and conversely fewer caravans than the one between Sherguz and Perf. The need to travel in groups for safety was less pressing.

  In the evening we reached a small community with campsites all around it. Quietly we joined other travelers at the shared fire and listened for gossip. There was no talk of the Namreen hunting an Attolian and a runaway slave—or of a murderous slave escaped from the capital either. I had a story prepared, ready to dismiss the second version as the inevitable exaggeration of rumormongering, but I didn’t need it.

  The Attolian thought it safe enough to stay at the campsite and continue on the road the next day. Mixed with the other traffic on the road, our presence would be unremarkable.

  In the morning I watched as a medicine seller, his wares tied to a wooden yoke, lifted it to his shoulders. All the bottles—different sizes, shapes, and colors to indicate their contents—swung on individual strings, lightly hitting one another with a delicate musical sound, the noise I’d heard the day before, carrying through the open air.

  The Attolian looked into his wallet and after a moment of indecision pulled out a coin to pay for two bowls of food from a man wheeling a giant pot through the camp. It was a soupy mix of grain and vegetables. The merchant apologized for the lack of meat, but I didn’t mind. I thought it was delicious and ran my finger around the inside of the bowl before I gave it back to him.

  “It’s only three days to Traba on the road,” the Attolian said. “Four, maybe.” He meant at the rate I traveled. “I think we can stay on the road without being too noticeable, especially if we keep our ear to the ground for word of the Namreen.” He was taking stock of our provisions and our resources. “We can fill our waterskins at the wells for free.” He looked at me apologetically. “And then to eat there’s—”

  “Caggi,” I said wearily.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We looked up at the walls of Traba. I had reluctantly agreed that we would need to part with the slave chain.

  “We’ll need to find a money changer with a questionable reputation,” said the Attolian. He approached a group of city guards where they were passing the time dicing against a wall in a game of Pits and Monsters. Not hiding his Attolian accent, but flaunting it, he joined the game, chatting comfortably about the dreariness of guard duty and the universal stupidity of superior officers. He’d staked our last bit of money and won at first, but the longer he played, the more he began to lose. At one point a loan from another player was all that kept him going. By then the other guards knew he was a soldier doing a favor for his father, traveling out to check on business matters with one of the family slaves.

  I waited nearby like an obedient dog, with my eyes on the ground, keeping my surprise to myself: I hadn’t heard the Attolian say so many words in all the days we had been together. He’d not been this voluble even with Roamanj’s caravan guards. By afternoon the Attolian had any number of new friends and was substantially in debt. When one of his new friends, a man with a scar across the bridge of his nose and several of his teeth missing, put a friendly arm around him, he dwarfed even the Attolian. The giant smiled as he said with unsettling intensity, “It would disappoint me to win that much money in a lucky game and not be paid what I am owed.”

  As the Attolian explained his very regrettable lack of coin, he hooked a finger through the chain on my neck. He and the Traban exchanged a speaking glance while I stood there with a watery smile. The giant suggested a money changer who might address the problem.

  “Master,” said I, bobbing along beside the Attolian as he strode into the market, “I strongly suggest you reconsider.”

  “Shut up,” said the Attolian. They were the first rude words he had spoken to me, and they cut, though I knew they weren’t meant to.

  Like a dutiful and long-term house slave, I hung on the Attolian’s shoulder all the way across the market to the small stall with a striped awning over it and a sign with the traditional scales that indicated a money changer, urging him to reconsider his plans. I stood wringing my hands while the Attolian explained his errand in a penetrating whisper.

  “Master,” I positively whined.

  “Shut up,” said the Attolian again, and turned back to the money changer. “And I’ll need another slave chain, somewhat cheaper, to fix the ownership seal to.”

  “Your honored father—” I said.

  “Is a thousand miles away,” said the Attolian.

  “But when we return—”

  “I’ll get another made before then. I always win my money back.”

  My face eloquent with discontent, I fell silent and obediently leaned forward so that the money changer could grasp the chain and with a sharp jerk pull it from my throat. I had never noticed its weight until I felt it slide from my neck. Next, the money changer threw a cheap imitation gold chain around my neck to replace the one that was gone. In a moment he’d run Nahuseresh’s plaque onto the chain and used a crimp to seal the links together.

  In less time than it takes a cup of coffee to cool, we were on our way. The Traban guard waiting for his money just outside was quickly paid off. He offered another game, but the Attolian asked instead where we could find a place to have a bath and spend the night, promising to return for a game in the morning.

  Once outside the market, the Attolian led the way into one alley after another until we were alone.

  “You are sure you don’t want another game with your nice new friends?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “No, thanks, I’m all for the quiet life.”

  Grasping the chain around my neck with one hand, he yanked it hard, but the chain didn’t break; he just pulled me off-balance, and I had to steady myself on his arm or fall over in the street.

  “The cheaper the chain, the harder to break,” I said, rubbing my neck. The gold in the chain of a high-status slave marks not only his value, but also his master’s trust in him.

  Using both hands, the Attolian gathered the links of the chain, and with muscles bunching under his skin, he wrenched it apart. He walked along the narrow alley until he came to an opening for the city sewer and dropped the chain to rattle through the grating. It was almost gone when I pinned it in place with my foot. Kneeling, I caught the little gold plaque with my master’s seal on it. Pure gold, it was easy to twist free.

  “It’s small enough to keep hidden,” I said.

  Looking down at me, the Attolian shrugged. “Keep it if you want,” he said.

  We walked through Traba and picked out a bathhouse for ourselves. The Attolian chose a prosperous-looking place, more expensive than a common guard was likely to afford. With my chain gone, we didn’t want to run into any of the men he had been dicing with earlier. Even after giving away almost a third of the money to pay our debts, we were suddenly very well off. When we were clean and shaved, we asked at the bathhouse for a good inn. We ate a prodigious amount and then staggered to our beds. In the morning, after the Attolian had checked them over carefully, we purchased two mules and some provisions. There’d been no sign that anyone from Perf had caught up to us, and we knew we would make good time riding instead of walking. We threw the Namreen’s saddlebags across the mules’ backs and left Traba feeling we were well ahead of any pursuit.

  “Have you been a slave all your life, Kamet?”

  We were alone on the road and could speak freely. It wasn’t a polite question, and the Attolian knew that, but we had been together long enough that he must have thought we had reached a point where we could ask uncomfortable questions—that he could a
sk uncomfortable questions, rather. I considered what I should answer—yes, I had been beneath contempt since birth? Or, on the contrary, that I had once been a man as worthy as himself and had become less of one at some time in my life?

  I waited a moment to see if he would retract the question, but he didn’t.

  “I was taken from my home as a child by raiders and then sold to the Mede.”

  “So you are not a Mede.”

  He seemed surprised. I wanted to ask him if I looked like a Mede.

  “I am Setran by birth.”

  The Attolian shook his head. “I don’t know anything of Setra.”

  “When you sailed from the Three Cities on the Isthmus to Iannis, if you had continued east you would have reached the city of Ghoda. Setra is in the highlands northeast of there.”

  “How old were you when you were captured?”

  It wasn’t as if I knew. I shrugged. “Old enough to have begun training as a scribe—I was on my way to lessons the morning the raiders came. Young enough that I ran back to my mother instead of on to the temple.” I remembered her shouting at me that I shouldn’t have come home to our fragile little house made of dried mud and reeds.

  “I see.” Then he considered, the way he often did, thinking things through before he spoke again.

  “The temple was fortified, then?”

  My memories were a confused jumble of what had been seen but not fully understood by a child. I hadn’t picked my way through them in years—I’d just taken my mother’s words for truth. I would have been safe with the priests, she had wailed, as the raiders literally tore our home apart. I had blamed myself for my fate—if only I had run toward the temple instead of away—but when I looked back as a grown man, it was obvious that the temple had been no more secure. Perhaps its walls had stood, but that was all. At the end of the day, there had been too many other acolytes in captivity for the priests to have repelled the raiders. The temple had been overrun, the priests were dead and dust—not carefully transcribing their records and setting them out to dry on the temple’s porches, as I had been imagining them for years.

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  The last time I had seen my mother, she had clutched at my head as if she could hold the memory of me in her hands if she only squeezed me tight enough before she let go. She was taken with my smaller brothers and sister by one man, but I had been selected by another. She had told me over and over again as they led her away, carrying my youngest brother in her arms, shouting it over her shoulder, “Tell them you are a scribe. Tell them you can write.”

  So, after we had been led away from the wreckage that was my village to a central camp that was a city of tents, I had dared to look my new master in the face and then carefully write my name with my finger in the dirt. Seeing it, the man had immediately squatted down beside me. Frightened, I had tried to scuttle away. He had grabbed me with bruising fingers and pulled me back. Wiping away my name until the dirt was smooth again, he had said in heavy accents, “Draw me a hu.” He said, “Now shee, now ur.” They were probably the only three letters the man knew, but I put them in the dust, and he smiled, showing all his yellow teeth. He nodded at me and stood up. That was all. But I rode one of the mules the next day when the camp city was packed up. I got no more food than my master’s three other slaves, but I did get an extra cup of water. None of his other slaves were from my village, and they looked at me with sullen resentment every time I drank. At night I slept as far from them as my tether would allow. I would never be one among them again. I was something different.

  “And how did you come to Nahuseresh?”

  Why could a rock not fall out of the sky on the Attolian’s head? “I was sold to the emperor’s agent in Ghoda and brought to Ianna-Ir with other slaves. Nahuseresh purchased me in the market there.”

  I had been purchased as an apprentice and eventual replacement for my master’s secretary, who had grown old and nearly blind. Jeffa taught me how to keep records and how to calculate, not just with the triangular marks of the reed, but with the more elegant strokes of ink and pen. Jeffa was gray and bent and remote, as if his life had already drained away and only a husk was left to instruct me, but he knew everything, and he passed it on to me, not only numbers and figures, but our master’s habits and hints of his dangerous moods. All the wisdom a slave needs to survive in a palace, he gave me, asking nothing in return.

  “You will go further than I did,” he told me, patting my head. “Our master’s father trained me to keep his records and little more, but he was an ambitious man, ambitious for his sons. They will be great men, and the slaves of great men wield great power as well. See how our master takes care that you learn other tongues? And takes you with him wherever he goes? He will make much of you.”

  I knew that Jeffa hoped to be retired as some faithful slaves are, sent off to our master’s country estate to be cared for as he aged, but he died instead of a putrid throat. The morning after his death, I moved my belongings into his office alcove, ran my hand over his desk, and called it mine—though of course, both the desk and I belonged to my master.

  Jeffa was the one who had warned me that I must be out in the sun every day if I didn’t want to grow blind as he had, that the dark room where we kept our accounts, the smoke of the lamp, would damage my eyes over time. In the years after his death, I tried to follow his advice, but my eyes had weakened anyway. I was by no means blind, but it was difficult to make out expressions on people’s faces from across a room. In the imperial palace, I hadn’t realized the Attolian was lying in wait for me. The other guards in the caravan had recognized the Namreen long before I did.

  The Attolian was watching me. “You know, back home I have a reputation for being closemouthed,” he said. He wasn’t the chatty Attolian I had first taken him for, it was true, so I nodded politely and then sank back into my thoughts as the mules carried us along.

  Koadester sits at the intersection of two of the empire’s great roads. The one we’d been on, going east to west, ran through Traba to Koadester on its way to Zabrisa on the coast. The other came down from the north, from Zaboar to Koadester, continuing south to Menle. The Ianna River is navigable only as far as Menle, but its source sits nearer Koadester where the meltwaters from the Taymets begin to come together. Those meltwaters bring the floods every year to the dry south, and the fertile ground around Koadester supplies much of the food consumed in the capital and by the emperor’s armies.

  First off, we had no need to go into the city. We only needed to buy food and move on, but the Attolian had developed a tourist’s desire to see the Stepwell of Ne Malia lying within its walls. Our road had risen steadily after we left Traba and once we reached the broad open plain on which Koadester sits, there were more and more people traveling with us. We had ridden for some time next to a farmer with a large cataract that had turned his eye as white as the onions filling his cart. He smelled as strongly as his produce, and I’d been secretly relieved when he struck up a conversation with the Attolian, not me. Bragging about his city, he’d told the Attolian about the stepwell, the very one in which Immakuk had descended to the gray lands—as wide at the top as the forecourt of Anet’s Great Temple and seven stories deep, with stairs going down on all five sides. In all of history, it had never been dry. Royalty came to sit in a pavilion near the water on hot summer days, and Ne Malia, goddess of the moon, would tell a man’s fortune in exchange for an offering at her altar.

  He was a most eloquent onion farmer.

  I did point out that we were not on an educational tour visiting monuments of the empire like wealthy adolescents, but the truth was, we both felt safe. The Namreen were far behind, and we thought ourselves well hidden, indistinguishable from other travelers on the road. The Attolian gave me the same stubborn look he’d given Roamanj, and into the city we went. We stabled our mules at a livery outside Koadester’s walls and walked through the open gates in the dry, hot afternoon. The city stank, but there were cool spaces i
n the shade cast by the buildings. We had no trouble finding the well, as there was a crowd of pilgrims come to ask the goddess for her help, and it was easy to follow them. We each purchased a token for the altar from an acolyte in the plaza, a flat ceramic plaque with eyes scribed across the top and a circle inside a pentagram set in the middle.

  “That’s you,” I said, pointing to the Attolian’s token. “And that’s Ne Malia’s symbol, the moon reflected in the water.” I traced the pentagram and the circle. “When you offer it to the well, the Goddess’s favor is on you.” Together we walked to where a raised course of stones prevented the rainwater from washing across the filthy plaza and falling directly into the purer waters of the spring below. The dirty water was diverted into pits under the paving stones of the plaza. The pits, filled with sand, filtered the runoff before it seeped into Ne Malia’s waters farther down.

  The well was just as impressive as the onion farmer had suggested. Each of its five sides was made up of interconnecting staircases descending to the water and then disappearing into it. Some staircases had risers only a giant, or a god, could comfortably use, while others were more suitable for mortal traffic. One could pick any staircase to start, but as some disappeared at each level, many routes at the top led into fewer and fewer options as the well narrowed toward the bottom. The miscellaneous crowd of pilgrims descending from all directions was funneled into just one line that snaked around four sides of the well, turning back on itself when it neared the fifth wall—reserved for the royal pavilion—and arriving finally at the altar just above the water. The altar was stone, but pieced together, so that as the water level dropped, it could be disassembled and rebuilt farther down. The line of pilgrims approached it from the side and made their offering to a priest, who carried each token out over the opaque green water and dropped it in. He waited for a message from the goddess and then returned to whisper it into a pilgrim’s ear before moving on to the next offering.