Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “I wondered when I was training to be a soldier if killing a man would be hard, but I learned that it’s usually very easy. It’s like throwing up a hand when you are startled, or wrenching at something that is stuck. You do it in a moment and without a thought, really. Afterward it can be like an avalanche . . . sometimes. In the nights after a battle, we always drink. A condolence if we’ve lost and a celebration if we’ve won, but it’s always a little of both. I think mostly we drink to drive the ghosts away. We all know it. When you think of all the deaths—our comrades, and the men who were someone else’s comrades—you drink to get through the night, because you won’t sleep otherwise. Some men haunt you longer than others. I haven’t thought much of the Namreen, though I suppose I will tonight.” He turned his head to look across the rocky hillside toward the open sky.

  “Will these slavers stay with you?”

  “I hope not. I have killed better men.”

  “Because they were Medes?”

  The Attolian looked puzzled. “But they weren’t Medes. I couldn’t understand a word they said.”

  “They were Setrans.”

  “Your countrymen? Kamet, I am more than sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, and I didn’t. I had no connection to those men just because we might have been born in the same place. “I meant, if they had been Attolians?”

  He shrugged. “They could just as easily have been Attolians, buying and selling slaves here in the empire. I am sure there are any number of Attolians equally despicable. Were they enemies of my king, then I would kill them. I am a soldier, Kamet. I am sorry if that distresses you.”

  He was quiet for a time before he continued, as if he were sorting his thoughts.

  “I might have been more reluctant to kill them if they hadn’t been murderers, but I wouldn’t have killed them just for that. That is not my right. I couldn’t have fought all the men if they had awakened, but I couldn’t honestly say when, in killing, I stopped doing the work of a soldier and began doing . . . some other thing.” He looked away, uncomfortable. “Battles are more straightforward.”

  He was quiet again.

  I thought of my master, Nahuseresh, in a rocky tomb by now at his family’s estate. That was one death I didn’t want the Attolian to know about. I wished more every day that I didn’t have to lie to him, but I saw no other choice. I knew that I had to separate myself from him in Zaboar. To go all the way to Attolia would be to invite my own death at the hands of the king when he found that he’d been tricked. Or at the hands of the emperor when he learned where I was.

  “Kamet, is there nothing that you liked about Attolia?”

  Startled by the change in subject, I again had no words.

  The Attolian laughed a little at me. “You won’t hurt my feelings. Why do you hate it so?”

  Gods help me, it was his home. “What makes you think I don’t like Attolia?” I asked disingenuously.

  “You said so. After the fight with the Namreen. You called it a backward, stinking cesspit.”

  “I did?”

  “So.”

  “I was upset,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  He looked me in the eye and called my bluff. “You did.”

  I searched for the least insulting thing I could say. “In Attolia,” I explained, “slaves are used for physical labor. Even free men rarely read and write. I was . . . an anomaly.” I wasn’t sure he knew what the word meant. “I was the only slave in the upper palace,” I said. “Free men in Attolia have nothing to do with slaves, so they had nothing to do with me. And the few slaves in the palace had just as little to do with a man who was educated and a secretary to his master. In the empire, the Medes respect their slaves.”

  He looked as if he disagreed. “And fear them,” he observed.

  That was certainly true. There was little that frightened the citizens of the empire like the possibility of a slave revolt.

  “What of the queen’s indentured?” the Attolian asked me.

  “They especially wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” The queen’s indentured, those who were paying off their families’ seven years of freedom from taxation with the same number of years in service to the crown, were snobs of the highest order. Their families had indentured them to pay for their educations, to raise their status, not to hobnob with slaves. “They will be free men and quite powerful when they go back to their provinces.”

  “I see. You were lonely?”

  “No, not lonely.” He deserved what truth I could give him. “I was unappreciated.”

  He snorted and covered it with his hand. I ducked my head in embarrassment.

  There had been friendly people in Attolia, but none who were impressed by any of the things I thought were important. I toed my shoe in the dust. “I am a little vain,” I admitted.

  “I had no idea,” said the Attolian with an impressively straight face.

  “I am used to being respected.”

  “And no one was awed that you speak four languages?”

  “Five.” I corrected him automatically, and he laughed outright.

  I laughed myself. I said, “Remember that I told you I had translated the tablets of Immakuk and Ennikar?”

  He nodded.

  “There was an errand boy at the palace—he was supposed to fetch and polish boots and sandals, stir vats in the laundry, that sort of thing—but he was more often hanging about in the kitchens or somewhere else out of sight, avoiding work. He was the one who pestered me to tell them a Mede story in Attolian. Well, I knew the Ensur language because I’d studied the texts for years. I had the translations into the Mede because I’d made them myself. I could tell him that story in Attolian because I had trained my whole life for it. I expected him to be impressed.”

  “And?”

  “He said he thought any idiot could do it.”

  It had all been very humbling, but I smiled now at the memory. “He was one of the queen’s indentured,” I said as that tidbit came to my mind. I shouldn’t have forgotten it because it was a point of such pride for him.

  “Not if he was a sandal polisher,” said the Attolian. “He was lying to you, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, he was certainly a liar,” I said, “but no one in the kitchens contradicted him when he bragged about it. Evidently his family took the queen’s tax forgiveness and used the money to educate his older brother. Then the brother was gravely injured in a wagon accident, both of his legs broken.” If he had died, the family’s debt would have been canceled. As he hadn’t, the debt had come due. “They sent the younger brother in his place.”

  “He was educated as well?”

  “No,” I said dryly. “That’s why he did the grunt work.”

  The Attolian guessed from my tone that the boy, raised as the free son of a landholding family, had made a poor servant, as indeed he had.

  “To my certain knowledge, he bit the man in charge of Attolia’s kitchens not once but twice,” I said.

  “Well, good for him,” the Attolian responded promptly. “More people should bite Onarkus,” and I realized that of course he knew that overly proud petty tyrant of Her Majesty’s kitchens. I think everyone had admired the sandal polisher that day. He’d paid for the bite with a terrific beating and then promptly bitten the man again.

  “You were often in the kitchens?” the Attolian asked, and I wondered if we had passed each other there without noticing.

  “My master brought very few servants to Attolia. There was just me to see to his food and his clothes, as well as the usual work of a secretary.” Another reason I hadn’t liked Attolia. “I was in the gardens often as well—when I was allowed time to myself.” Grudgingly I admit here that the gardens are also beautiful, that there are more beautiful things in Attolia than I was willing to recognize at the time. The gardens—their lush bounty of green and growing things all meticulously trimmed to perfect order—filled my heart with a kind of contentment I had never known. They wer
e so different from the tiled courtyards of the emperor’s palace—also beautiful but sterile in comparison.

  “My king liked the gardens,” the Attolian said. “He was almost assassinated in them, and I don’t know if he walks there anymore. The queen didn’t want him to.”

  I would have made a snide comment about a man ruled by his wife if I hadn’t myself been terrified of the queen. Instead, I said, “That work-dodging kitchen boy, he liked the gardens—for hiding in. The first time we met, he was under a bush trying to avoid stirring vats of piss in the laundry. When I asked how he would explain his absence, he said he’d tell the people in the kennels he’d been in the laundry, and the people in the laundry that he’d been cleaning out the kennels.”

  The Attolian shook his head in amusement. “And did you tell him a story while he was hiding?”

  “No, I only told him the one story of Immakuk and Ennikar before he went home.”

  “Home? How? I thought he was indentured?”

  “He said he had run away before and meant to try again.” I cast a significant look at the Attolian. “He said the palace guard had hunted him down the first time.”

  The Attolian looked surprised. “Not while I was at the palace.”

  “He told me quite the tale—chased into the hills, swords, guns. Are you sure?”

  The Attolian laughed. “Surely his family would have sent him back,” he said. He knew that you don’t cheat the queen of Attolia of her due.

  “He didn’t return. I assume they found some other way to repay the crown. I even got a gift from him later.”

  The Attolian’s look was speculative.

  “I might have given him a coin to help him on his way.”

  “So?” he prompted.

  “His family was in a fishing village some way down the coast, past Ifrenia. It was a long way to go with the bloodthirsty palace guard after him. When he made it home, he recopied one of his brother’s scrolls and sent it to me.” The handwriting had been atrocious—I could see why the scribes hadn’t let him work with the rest of the queen’s indentured—but the text had been by Enoclitus, and I’d never seen it before. “It’s the one thing I took with me when my master and I fled the fortress at Ephrata.” I’d rolled it tight and forced it into a bottle. The stopper had leaked but the scroll had still been mostly readable.

  Intuiting much, the Attolian said, “You had to leave it behind in Ianna-Ir.”

  I dismissed his concern, guilt-bitten by my own lies.

  “What else did you leave?” he asked.

  My death, I thought. I left my death behind.

  I shrugged and said, “Nothing of any importance.”

  The twilight had deepened, and the Attolian thought it safe to move on. We climbed on toward the saddle in the hills above us and descended across much the same kind of ground on the far side. It was more treacherous going down than up, and I fell when a stone that appeared perfectly safe rolled out from under me.

  “I’m fine,” I called to the Attolian, some distance ahead.

  “Of course,” he said back.

  I rubbed my leg resentfully. It’s funny how this works. We do better when we are praised and worse when we feel unappreciated for our work. I’d hated being in Attolia and hadn’t at all enjoyed the months at my master’s family estate, when I’d had little to do and too much time to do it. When we’d returned to the emperor’s palace, I had reveled in my work and in the respect I received from those around me. Now I was nurturing a sense of pride in my growing strength, but I feared the Attolian would expect too much of me.

  We hadn’t gone far, but it was already pitch dark when we reached the bottom of the next narrow valley. We stood on a thin line of soil, a dry streambed that barely supported a few scraggling bushes and had failed to support a tree that stretched its dead branches into the air. In front of us was a rocky hillside just as high as the one we had just descended. There was no sense in moving farther unless the moon rose, and even then we would have to proceed with caution to avoid breaking a bone among the rocks.

  We still couldn’t risk a fire, but the Attolian collected what fuel he could find. He used his blanket and his belt to make a bundle of it that he could carry on his shoulder; then we ate the last bites of dried meat we had from the slavers and waited to see if the moon would give us enough light. When it rose, we began climbing again, moving even more slowly than before, the moon shadows more treacherous than their daytime cousins. I looked longingly down the valley, along the relatively flat streambed, but the Attolian shook his head.

  “We’ve no idea where it will lead us. If we keep heading north, we will eventually leave the empire and cross over into Zaboar.”

  “Assuming the way north is passable.”

  “Assuming that, yes.”

  We climbed the next hill, and from its crest the Attolian could see signs of a road below. I had to take his word for it.

  “Probably leads to another mine,” he said. We started carefully down. This hillside was as treacherous as the one before, and as we got closer to the bottom, I could see that the roadway was partially blocked by a slide. In spite of our care, we both lost our balance and rolled down in a shower of rocks. Sitting up at the bottom, the Attolian asked if I was all right and, when I didn’t answer, hurried to my side. I was staring at the rocks and what they had partly covered over.

  “A slave escaped from the mines,” said the Attolian.

  “He didn’t get far,” I said. Like us, he’d fallen on the hillside, but unlike us, he’d died of it. He must have hit his head as he fell, or the rocks came down on top of him once he’d hit bottom. The side of his head was crushed and black with blood.

  “No, not far,” said the Attolian. He reached to lift one hand of the corpse. “Just recently dead,” he said.

  “Could it be one of—”

  “The men we freed? I don’t see how. I can’t believe any of them could be moving faster than we are, not in the state they were in.”

  Reluctantly I stood, wishing I could do something for this corpse, but there was nothing to do that would make any difference to him now. So we walked away, again choosing the rocky climb up the next hillside instead of the deceptively inviting road. The road would lead us nowhere we wanted to go.

  When I woke the next morning, the sky over me was gray. Thinking it was just dawn, I fell back asleep and woke again to find it still gray. The Attolian was standing with his back to me, staring upward as if he could pierce the clouds like his god Miras with a magic arrow.

  “This is unexpected,” he said.

  We waited for the skies to clear, but they did not. There were brighter spots, but it was impossible to tell if this was the sun itself shining through or only a thin place in the clouds. In these irregular hills we needed the sun to guide us.

  “I’ll climb to the top of this ridge,” said the Attolian, “and see if there is a landmark we can navigate by. Watch for my signal.”

  He came back without having signaled, but I hadn’t wasted the time he was away.

  “Is that edible?” he asked when I held up the ring snake I’d caught.

  “I think so,” I said. I was certainly hungry enough to eat it.

  “There’s another valley just the same beyond this one. Why don’t we go that far and, if it seems safe, cook the snake? I can make a fire without too much smoke. If the skies clear, we’ll push on, and if not, we’ll just have to wait out the clouds. We can’t afford to lose our sense of direction.”

  I nodded. It seemed as good a plan as any. So I wore the snake draped over my shoulder as we climbed. The Attolian already had the wood for our fire balanced on his. Hunger lent skill to my feet, and I picked my way quickly up the hill. Whatever unpleasantness I might have encountered in my life, I’d never been this hungry for this long, and I deeply resented the clenched emptiness in my middle. I refused to think of the emaciated slaves we’d left behind. I was concentrating so hard on not thinking of the poor men laboring in the mines ar
ound us that I nearly jumped out of my skin when the Attolian grabbed me by the arm. Heart in my mouth, I looked where he pointed, but it was no armed enemy watching us from the far side of the next narrow valley. It was a wild goat.

  “Much better than snake,” whispered the Attolian. Stripping the bundle off his back, he lowered it to the ground with only a slight sound of wood bumping against wood. Catlike and much faster than we’d been moving together, he made his way down to the flat ground at the center of the valley and then up the far slope. The goat didn’t seem alarmed, but it didn’t wait for him either. It moved off across the hillside, the Attolian following after. I descended more slowly to the bottom of the valley and arranged the wood for a fire and looked over the snake. I’d had ring snake before, but it had been cooked in a tureen. I wasn’t sure what to do with it out in the wild. Instead of making a bad job of slicing it up, I went hunting down the valley for more firewood while I waited for the Attolian to return.

  He was gone most of the afternoon, but when he came back, it was with the goat over his shoulder. I nearly cheered and pitched the now thoroughly unappetizing snake up the rocky hillside. The Attolian was less happy. When he reached the fireside, he threw the carcass down with a grunt.

  “There are Namreen everywhere,” he said abruptly. “I think that road we saw must lead to some sort of passage into the Taymets, and they are watching it. We can’t have a fire. We have got to get out of here in a hurry, and I can’t carry the damn goat, but if we leave it here, they are sure to find it and guess we are nearby.”

  He rubbed his face. “I didn’t see the Namreen until after I’d killed the goat. I haven’t gutted it yet. Maybe we can eat the liver, but then we’ve got to be on our way. I’ll hide the carcass and hope for the best.”

  I suggested we could go back to the rockslide we had caused earlier and hide the goat underneath a new one. So the Attolian cut out the liver with as little mess as possible, we split it between us, and then he carried the rest of the goat back over the hill and I carried the firewood. While we climbed, I had another idea, and when we reached the dead body of the slave, I told the Attolian to leave the goat next to it. He went up the hill to start another slide that covered the goat completely, and most of the body of the slave. I added a judicious few more rocks until only an outstretched hand remained visible. Beside it, I placed the gold plaque from my slave chain, set just deeply enough between the rocks that it would seem to have fallen from the body during the slide, but not so deeply set that it would be missed by an observer.