Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Oh, I thought hopelessly, this isn’t going to end well.

  I swung around toward the Attolian and without warning shouted in his face. “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” I shouted. “I would be safe at home if I hadn’t listened to you.” The Attolian looked at me, as bewildered as I had expected. He hadn’t understood the Setrans. “I am sorry,” he said, as if an apology in this predicament was helpful. He didn’t call me Morik, and this wasn’t an act. “You would be better off if you had stayed with N—”

  Not even these stupid slavers would believe our story if he mentioned my master by name. I shifted my weight, and using both feet, I kicked him as hard as I could between the legs.

  The Attolian screamed. For an eternal moment his face was frozen, wide eyed, in shock and pain. Then he clutched himself and rolled to his side, curling up like a newborn over his injured manhood. Meanwhile, I continued shouting, calling him vile names and cursing him for his imaginary faults. The slavers laughed. The man with the flask swung it at my head, but by then I was already retreating as far as the chain would let me, even as I kept up my name-calling. The Attolian lay on his side gasping. When he could talk, he spoke in Attolian, so hoarse and so shrill that the men nearby were more likely to think they’d misheard than that the words had been unfamiliar. “—kill you,” were the only ones clear to me.

  Laughing with the other slavers, the man with the flask stepped back to watch what would happen.

  I could only pray that the Attolian would realize the reason for my actions. Or that if he didn’t, the slavers wouldn’t really let him murder me. I couldn’t be sure what to expect from men who would kill a slave rather than take the trouble of chaining him properly.

  Very frightened, I tried to retreat further as the Attolian got himself up on his knees and crawled toward me. It did little good. He lifted the chain attached to my ankle and pulled. He was still too hunched to sit up straight, but the muscles in his arms tightened and I slid helplessly toward him.

  I curled into a ball, the only defensive measure I could take. Rather than smashing my head with his fist, the Attolian seemed more intent on getting his hands around my neck. Like a plated lizard, I curled even tighter. The Attolian grunted as he pulled my arms away from my face. I took a chance and flipped myself over and scrambled away, but he pulled me back. We repeated this maneuver several times, to the hysterical amusement of our captors, until suddenly it was over. The Attolian had gotten a hand around my neck, and I couldn’t move. He pressed me against the ground as I tried to pry his iron fingers away.

  I would have tried to explain myself at that point, I would have said anything to persuade him to let go, but my breath was no more than a whistle, and then even the whistling stopped. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. It grew louder, and the Attolian’s face grew darker and seemed to be receding.

  Then the darkness began to clear. The slavers had pulled the Attolian off, and I could breathe again. Sobbing for air, weeping with relief, I looked around to see if they had had enough entertainment or if they meant to release him for another round. It seemed they had had amusement enough, because they dragged the Attolian as far as the chain permitted and hammered a spike through one of the links into the ground, pinning him in place. They should have secured him to one of the iron staples in the rock wall, but it would have been more work, and they were too lazy. Instead, they added another spike to the chain just out of his reach, fixing that link to the ground so that he couldn’t pull me toward him. Then they went away to sleep, leaving the grumbling Kepet on guard, warning him to do a better job or the Attolian might work his way free in the night and kill his little friend.

  I sat rocking, holding my throat, not once looking toward the Attolian. The slaves around me curled up on their sides, shifted briefly on the hard ground before they fell into exhausted sleep. Through all the noise and the fighting, they had paid us little attention. They were too far gone to care much. I watched Kepet as he, too, fell asleep.

  In the silence I heard the dry scratching as the Attolian worked at the spike that pinned him in place. I didn’t look. Nor did I look at the soft slithering click of the metal links in the chain as he moved across the ground to the second peg. The chain pulled at my ankle, and I lifted it so that it would make no noise as he approached, but instead of growing slack, it stayed taut. I turned to see him moving catlike in the arc described by the length of his tether, heading for Kepet. He reached for him, and there was a popping sound, so small even the noise of a cricket would have obscured it. Then the Attolian carefully lowered the body to the ground.

  The rest of the slavers were farther away, beyond the Attolian’s reach. Holding my breath, I turned to the slave sleeping beside me. Gently I shook him awake. He looked up at me, confused and exhausted. I put my finger to my lips and then pointed. The slave sat up, saw Kepet’s body and the Attolian standing over him. He could have warned the slavers in hopes that they would reward him, but he did not. Silently he woke the man next to him. Any one of them could have given us away, in hope of a reward, perhaps his freedom, but the slavers had sealed their fate. Not one slave made a sound. Lifting the chains and holding them, they gave me room to move closer to the Attolian so that he in turn could move closer to the other slavers.

  One after another, he broke two necks. Each time there was a frenzied but nearly soundless kicking and a quiet crunching sound as the bones gave way.

  Sickened, I pulled on the chain, like a panicked man trying to rein in a runaway horse. The Attolian, feeling the tug at his ankle, turned to me, murder in the set of his shoulders. Spineless, I let him have the slack he needed. He faced me a moment longer, then took up a log from beside the fire and, swinging it hard, clubbed the next man and the next. The slavers were finally aware of their danger, but it was too late. As those remaining leapt up, the Attolian swung his club and laid each one out in turn.

  “Tell them to sit on these men,” he said to me, and waved at the slaves. They didn’t need a translation. With a rattling of chains, they jumped onto the slavers. If they’d had any strength at all, they might have torn them apart, but the most they could do was hold the men while the Attolian reached for the hammer and pry bar that had been left lying nearby. In a few strokes, he was free. He freed each of the slaves next, leaving me for last.

  Once the restraint on my ankle was gone, I went to the packs dumped on the ground near the mules and began to go through them. There was no bread and there was no time to cook the grains, but there was dried meat and some dried fruit. There was a leather bag filled with tin coin, probably their payments for recent sales they had made at other mines. Behind me, the Attolian began hammering the cuffs around the ankles of the slavers he’d left alive. Cursing, they strained to get free of the slaves piled on top of them. One man did get loose, briefly. The Attolian downed his tools and seized him by the head, then hauled him struggling across the campsite to where Kepet lay with his neck broken. The Attolian never said a word, only held the slaver there, face to the body, before he dragged him back and threw him down beside his colleagues, where he lay without moving and without speaking.

  Once the slavers were chained, the slaves came to me for the food I had found in the mule packs. There was little water left in the skins, but one of the slaves, speaking for the first time in a hoarse voice, said that the skins had been filled earlier that evening at a spring by the road, so more water was not far away.

  I went through all the pockets and purses of the slavers and emptied out all their money. “Thieves,” snarled one of the slavers. “You won’t get away with this.”

  One of the slaves laughed harshly. “And if you catch us, what? We will be sent to the mines?”

  The Attolian took up the hammer again and dragged the end of the chain to one of the rings set in the rock wall around the campsite. Once he’d secured it, using an ankle cuff to make a closed loop, he stood. Muscles straining in the red glow of the firelight, he pulled until he was certain
it would take a hammer to get free. Then the Attolian threw the hammer as hard as he could into the dark.

  “You cannot leave us here,” protested one slaver.

  I translated for the Attolian.

  “Tell him he’s next to the road,” said the Attolian. “Someone will come by.”

  “And if no one does?” said the man, when I repeated the words in Setran.

  The Attolian snorted, guessing what the slaver’s words meant. “Then maybe Kepet will have got off easy,” he said. I didn’t bother to translate that.

  We packed up the mules, and the Attolian herded all of us down the road. The slaves moved slowly, but the Attolian was patient. He and I could hardly move faster anyway in the pitch dark over the rough surface, and we would have missed the spring on our own. One of the slaves warned us when we were close, and we listened for the sound of water murmuring over rocks. We stopped there to fill waterskins—two of them our own, taken back from the slavers. The Attolian explained that he and I would take some of the provisions and head back up the road toward the mines. “We go north,” he said. “We are hunted, and our hunters will come after each of you. You may want to try to hide in the hills or make your way down to the plain. I can’t tell you which is best.”

  “And the mules?” The slaves were resting in the dark all around us and I didn’t know who spoke.

  “You can have the mules,” said the Attolian, “but ride them hard, and abandon them in the first village you come to.”

  “Those slavers will be out for blood,” said another voice.

  “And our pursuers even more so,” the Attolian warned.

  Diffidently I said, “There is a temple of Amrash at Nerket. Go west on the wagon trail below here, and when it joins the emperor’s road to Zabrisa, go back east. It’s not far from where the roads meet.” The temple at Nerket was a sanctuary for escaped slaves, which would have angered local slaveholders more were it not that the slaves, once received in the temple, were forbidden to leave. The priests of Amrash were very poor—it was a subsistence living a slave faced within the temple walls. Common decency should have allowed such a haven for those so abused by their masters that they would choose that life. Cynicism made me think the sanctuary was tolerated because the slaves there had so little value. For the men crouched in the darkness around us, a life of peaceful service to the god and a roof over their heads would be a haven indeed.

  There was quiet while each considered the risk and weighed it against his good fortune in being free at all.

  “I’ll take a mule,” said one of the men.

  “I as well,” said another, “but I have the strength yet in my legs to get along on my own. I won’t take a mule if there is someone who needs it more.”

  No one else, weak though they were, was willing to risk being mistaken for us. We stripped the packs from the mules, passed out what was valuable in them, and then handed them over to their riders.

  “When you reach the first town, ride through it, so you can be seen to be a gray-haired slave on his way to the sanctuary—not an Attolian, not a Setran house slave. Then abandon the mule and hide for a while, or go overland. Those hunting us should not follow you further.”

  Odd that he called me Setran. I had not felt myself a Setran in a long time. Nor Mede either, for that matter. Our earlier conversation seemed to belong to a different world now, when the Attolian and I were comrades by the nighttime fire. Setra was no homeland to me. I had no homeland, but perhaps the Attolian only wanted to think of me as something other than Mede because he hated the Medes, or because he hated and respected the Medes but merely hated me. I didn’t know.

  With two waterskins between us and much less than our share of the food and money, we started back up the road toward the mines. The Attolian had not dithered over the disposition of the food and money, and I think that he gave most of it away. We each had a blanket roll and a set of spare clothes, useful but smelly. The Attolian was armed again with one of the slavers’ swords as well as a hunting knife and a small bow and its arrows. We were better equipped now than we had been on leaving Koadester, except for the Attolian’s missing breastplate and our cookpot and all our money gone.

  I would miss the cookpot. We should have taken the slavers’ when we had the chance, but we’d left it in the ashes of the fire. I know the Attolian was thinking of his sword and his armor, buried somewhere under the rocks to the east of us, but there was no time to go hunting them and little chance we could find them anyway. He said nothing, but I could guess how much it pained him to abandon them.

  I had a long knife and a very small one that I had taken because it was just like one I had used for years to shape my pens. I felt I was more likely to get something done with the smaller knife in the right place than with the larger one, which I was afraid even to draw from its sheath. I did not discount the possibility that I might be using the knife on the Attolian, who had not once looked at me, though he had addressed several remarks meant for me to the air above us as if I were floating somewhere overhead, and several to the ground as if I were reclining somewhere to his left. Even if it had saved us, I did not expect him to forgive me that kick to the groin. I would pay a price, I was sure.

  Head down, I followed him back up the road. When we got close to the slavers, we could hear the sullen argument going on as they tried to twist the pin out of the cuff and work the iron staple out of the rock. It was easy, in the darkness, to pass by without being noticed. The ground was dry and hard, and I doubt we even left footprints.

  We went on as quickly as we could without risking a fall. As the sky began to lighten, we came to the end of the road. It opened out, to our right, into many smaller tracks around the tips and tailings of several mines. Sheds scattered across the hillside were dark and silent and still in the predawn air. Ahead of us, only a thread of a hunting track continued up the rocky slope. Without speaking, the Attolian began to climb. With the growing light, it was not impossible to find the way, and by the time the sun cleared the horizon, the mine was some distance below us.

  The hunting track began to cut farther and farther to the right, headed toward a stretch of scrubby bushes. It was probably a loop that would eventually return to the mine, whereas we needed to make our way uphill. The Attolian picked a likely saddle in the ridge above us and began moving toward it. The whole hillside was rocks. As we moved higher, there was no more soil, just an unending pile of stones, all of them rounded, even the ones as big as a bull, unstable and threatening to roll underfoot. Picking a way, step by awkward step, was exhausting. I fell farther and farther behind.

  Finally, the Attolian passed out of sight behind a large boulder, and I stopped to catch my breath, seeking some hidden reserve of strength that I didn’t find. While I was still looking for it, the Attolian moved back into view and waved at me to catch up. I put my head down and focused only on my next step and the one after that. When at last I reached the place where I had seen him, I found behind the large boulder a flat area the size of a large tabletop, mostly level. The Attolian was already lying down on it with his back to me. I dropped beside him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I woke as the sunlight was dimming. A breeze made my skin rise in goose pimples, and I shivered. I opened my eyes to see the Attolian already sitting up, wrapped in a blanket. I began to unroll my own.

  “Kamet,” said the Attolian in a low voice, “I am sorry. I hope you will forgive me.”

  I looked up at him, speechless. How many times had he apologized to me already? “I’m sorry,” he’d said on the riverside in Ianna-Ir at the very start of my deceit, when I let him believe he had misspoken “after noon” for “after dark.” He’d apologized when it was the Namreen who had sliced open my head, apologized for having only caggi to offer me, apologized for leading us into Koadester. I’d paid little attention, assuming his apologies were the result of habit, not intent. How many times does a slave hear the word “sorry” made meaningless? “I’m sorry, Kamet, but you mu
st fetch another scroll, bottle of wine, set of linen, robe from the tailor. Kamet, I am sorry, but the accounts must be completed by morning. I’m so sorry, but there’s no bed for you. Sorry, Kamet, there’s nothing left for your dinner.” How many times had my master used that word? As many times as I had bowed my head and said, “Yes, master, of course, of course.”

  I opened my mouth, and no words came. I didn’t know what to say when “sorry” meant something, what to say to an apology that was so obviously sincere.

  I fell back on habit and apologized myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was afraid.”

  “I know,” said the Attolian. “I understand. I made a poor slave.” He smiled at the irony, both of us thinking of Koadester.

  We sat quietly for a while after that. There was no wood for a fire, and we couldn’t make one anyway as we couldn’t risk being seen. We also couldn’t move out from behind the rock that was hiding us from view. From where he was sitting, the Attolian could watch for new activity at the mine. He said there had been no sign so far that the slavers had been discovered, so we just sat, each picking at our meager handful of dried food, trying to make it last. I noticed the Attolian’s earring was back in his ear. I’d feared that it had fallen from his mouth when I’d kicked him or that he’d swallowed it.

  “Is it because they are your enemies that they are so easy to kill?” I asked hesitantly.

  The Attolian looked up, and then down again at the sliver of dried meat in his hand as if it were going to crawl away if he didn’t watch it carefully.

  “You have seen men die,” he said. “You were not so squeamish about the Namreen.”

  “I’ve seen many people die,” I agreed. “I’ve never held a man’s life in my hands.” I looked down at those hands, scraped and very dirty now, but still free of calluses except the one that came from holding a stylus. “I was no threat to the Namreen, certainly, and I was too worried that I was dying, I suppose. But last night’s work was . . . different.”