Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Then we will go,” said the Attolian. But before he could take another step back, all the men stood at once. The Attolian drew his sword. No sooner was it free of its scabbard than a man, unseen on the machinery above, dropped onto the Attolian’s shoulders.

  I had looked around already for a weapon. There was nothing that would serve as a club, but there was a half-filled sack nearby. As the men in the mill closed in on the Attolian, I lifted the sack by its upper edge and swung it, first back behind me and then in a long, sweeping arc toward the head of the approaching miller. The first blow was the most satisfying. The bag was heavy enough and its momentum great enough that it knocked the miller clean over. The bag kept going, nearly pulling me over, too, while the Attolian was handling his attacker with ease, first backing hard against a post, pinning the man, and then stepping forward before slamming him again. His attacker was knocked back and front. He dropped to the ground, clutching his nose with one hand and the back of his head with the other.

  My second attempt with the bag was weaker. I didn’t have time to swing it back as far and instead danced a step or two forward to add some momentum. The sack was rotten and split just as it hit the man I was aiming for. It wasn’t half filled with grain, as I had assumed, but flour. As the split widened, the flour erupted in a stinking cloud. To my great distress, the Attolian caught the worst of it—he retreated, struck blind. Our attackers retreated as well, but we couldn’t afford to dawdle. I backed into the Attolian and was pushing him toward the door as the miller was climbing to his feet, wiping the flour from his eyes. There was still some left in the sack, so I swung again and again at him until all the flour had escaped. Finally, I was swinging an empty sack, and we were out of the mill.

  I would have run for the road, but the Attolian planted himself at the doorway, assuming the men would have to come at him one at a time. There was no time to point out that the mill would almost certainly have more than one entrance. I was pulling hard on the Attolian’s shoulder, and thinking I would explain to him his stupidity at a later date, when the barking that came from some outbuilding suddenly grew much louder. The dog was already rounding a corner and loping toward us. It was a huge beast, black and as big as a donkey, I swear, with a ruff like a lion. I shouted a warning, the Attolian turned to fend it off, and the miller lunged from the doorway.

  Parrying the miller’s knife, the Attolian had no chance to use his sword against the dog as it went for his throat. Overwhelmed, he went down. He rolled onto his back and briefly made it to his feet, but the miller pushed him hard as the dog jumped again. The Attolian stumbled, then staggered under its weight. Struggling for his balance, he went backward, stepping onto the rotten well cover. There was a soft rending sound. He and the dog disappeared. We heard a heavy fall and a single sharp yelp, then a long silence.

  The burly miller looked at me with hate-filled eyes. “No water,” he spat. It was a dry well.

  I turned and ran.

  I leapt across the empty ditch and onto the road as if I had wings on my feet. I heard no one following me but still ran on until I was spent, finally stumbling to a halt. I tried to wipe away the stinking flour from my clothes. I tried to shake it out of my hair, but it mixed with my sweat and stuck to me. I could feel it on my face however hard I scrubbed with my hands, and my mouth was thick with the taste of it. I spit and spit again. Then I turned and looked at the empty road behind me. The Attolian was dead.

  I’d meant to leave him in Zaboar. I’d liked him—more than I’d ever expected to, but I’d still meant to leave him. I would have slipped away—he would have boarded a ship back to Attolia. There was no other choice. There was nothing for me in Attolia. I’d never meant to go to Attolia.

  Nothing about my plans had changed, but I stood for a long time staring down the empty road, my arms hanging useless at my sides, waiting, as if he would appear, as if the world would settle back into its proper course, like the wine in a tilting wine cup saved just before it tipped too far. But the cup was overturned, the wine spilled. My master was dead. Now the Attolian was dead as well. I was free to go wherever I chose, and at last I started toward the city.

  The day grew hotter. I refused to think of water. When I came to the next town, I marched straight through without turning my head to stare back at anyone who might be staring at me. Eventually, though, I came to a spot where a wooden bridge crossed over a narrow irrigation ditch, and I slipped down beside it, ducking my head into the brackish water to wash away the last of the flour. I rinsed out my shirt and twisted it dry, trying not to think of the ice-cold water in the fountain just a few days earlier. I didn’t notice the piece of waterweed that clung to the shirt until I unwound the fabric and saw the green stains. I sat staring at it, despairing, but in the end, instead of trying to rinse out the mess, I just put the wet shirt on and kept going.

  The road was eventually hemmed in by the walls of gardens and stables and then by inns and shops and ever-larger buildings. There were blocks of apartments, three and four stories tall, and I still hadn’t reached the city walls. Dusty ruts were replaced with paving stones, and intersections grew more frequent. When it wasn’t clear anymore which was the main road into the city, I turned at random and walked blindly through the streets. I stopped for a drink at a public fountain and washed my face again.

  I saw a weapons shop and went in to sell my knife. The man behind the counter offered me a pittance, far less than the knife was worth. Then he looked me in the face. Whatever he saw prompted him to quadruple the price and cautiously slide the money across the counter to me. My hands shaking, I swept it up and left without a word.

  Later in the day I arrived on the waterfront. I still hadn’t seen the walls of the city, having somehow circled around them. My rage at the hapless man in the weapons shop had drained away, leaving me embarrassed for myself and exhausted. All I wanted to do was rest. I found a spot of wall not blocked by a vendor’s stall and leaned against it, closing my eyes. I would have sat there in the shade of the neighboring stall, but too many people had used the space to piss.

  I had no money. I had lost the bundle with my blanket and supplies—it had fallen in the mill yard when I was running away—so I had the clothes I stood up in and nothing else. I could scribe, could offer my services for a fee, but I had no means to buy pens and inks, vellum or paper to demonstrate my skills. I had my life, I reminded myself. I had my freedom. I had followed others’ directions long enough. But my thoughts were like birds that wouldn’t settle, flying around in my head. I heard again and again the single yelp and the silence from the well, saw the miller’s smug animosity, smelled the stink of the flour, and felt again the pounding of my footsteps as I ran away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You’re certain he’s dead?” someone asked.

  My eyes flew open, and I straightened up. A stranger stood before me, taller than the Attolian and slim, very elegant. He had a long, narrow face darker than my own and a heavier beard than I will ever grow. The patterns at the edges of his soft skullcap, and the ones around the collar and hem of his belted shift, marked him as a traveler from beyond the Isthmus.

  “Your pardon, sir?”

  The man repeated himself, and this time I heard him say, “Is there a pain in your head? You look unwell.”

  “No,” I stammered. “Thank you, I am quite well.”

  “Ah, I see it is grief, not illness, that strikes, but there are rumors of plague in the city. It is perhaps unwise to lean so sorrowfully against a wall, you see?”

  I did see.

  He said, “You have lost a friend?”

  “He was not my friend,” I said automatically, then wondered why I’d said anything at all.

  “Hmm,” said the man, thoughtfully tensing his lower lip. “You know, I think you are mistaken about that,” and he smiled, very kindly.

  I thought back to the many dead in my life. I had told the Attolian as we sat among the stones above the tin mines that I had seen many deaths,
and I had. Young and old, the houseboys of a fever, Jeffa of the same—other slaves and free men, associates of Nahuseresh, by age or disease or violence. All were alive one day and dead the next, as instantly as the Attolian, and yet this feeling was new, this particular loss, as if some part of me had been hollowed out, leaving me at a standstill and directionless.

  The man said gently, careful to avoid offense, “You will forgive a man who has given you one bit of good advice if he gives more, won’t you? If you are wrong about whether he is a friend, perhaps you are wrong as well about whether he is gone, hmm? Sometimes we mistake these things.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Be certain before you let go of him. I once was lost, and my friend came for me.” He patted my arm and waved a good-bye before heading away into the crowded market.

  I didn’t dare lean back against the wall. He was right that rumors of plague could be dangerous for the sick and the well. They didn’t always check for plague signs before they tossed anyone who appeared to be ill into plague houses. Better to be on the safe side, they would say, never mind the poor soul going to certain death.

  The stranger had had an immense dignity about him. It had been inconceivable to be rude to him, in spite of his intrusion into my private affairs, but the Attolian had not been my friend. The Attolian had been no more to me than a convenience.

  “Sometimes we mistake these things.”

  The Attolian was dead. There had been no sound from the well. Only the yelp of the dog and then silence, echoing up from the depths. I looked back over the crowd in the market for a glimpse of the man in the patterned cap, as if I could go to him and insist that he was the one who was mistaken, but by then he was out of sight. I closed my eyes briefly and saw an image of the Attolian lying at the bottom of the well, not dead but dying. His legs or his back broken, calling for help. For a drink of water in the dark. Begging the miller to save him. I shook the image away.

  What could I hope to accomplish by returning except to waste a chance to put myself further from the reach of bounty hunters or the Namreen? He was dead. There was nothing I could have done but run away. I would have ended up in the well myself if I had stayed. How long might it take the Attolian to die, if he was alive in that well, if he was alone there? Someone bumped against me in the crowd. Startled, I lifted my eyes from the ground, looking around to see who had bumped me, but I couldn’t tell. I looked up at the impersonal blue sky over my head, thought of flying up and away in Anet’s Chariot, and then I began to retrace my steps to the mill.

  It was past midnight by the time I got back to the mill yard. The full moon overhead made the walls of the mill stark and beautiful, and all the spaces between the buildings impenetrably black. It was quiet. The miller, it seemed, had had only one dog.

  I stood by the side of the well, dithering. Finally, I lay down on my stomach and lowered my head through the irregular hole in the rotten cover. There was no sound from below. I stretched my neck and turned my head, listening for any sign of life, and impaled myself on a splinter of broken wood.

  “Monsters of hell,” I whispered sharply, pulling away from the splinter that was sticking into my skin perilously close to my eye.

  “Kamet?” said a quiet voice from below.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin and then froze, not sure if it was the Attolian or the ghost of him that spoke.

  “You’re alive?” I whispered.

  “Of course I’m alive,” he said, sounding peeved.

  “Well, why didn’t you say something?”

  “I just did.”

  “I meant before I stuck myself with a splinter like an awl.”

  “Maybe because I thought you were the miller, you idiot.”

  “Oh, you were expecting him to sneak into his own mill yard in the middle of the night?” I didn’t know why I was so angry.

  “Kamet,” said the Attolian patiently, “stop arguing, please, and get me out of here.”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I’ve tried climbing the walls, but they are smooth down here, and I can’t get a grip.”

  “I saw rope in the mill earlier.”

  “That would help.”

  I pulled my head out of the well and turned toward the yawning darkness that was the entryway to the mill. I’d seen the rope running through a pulley system deep inside, but I wasn’t sure I could find it in the dark. Fortunately, the moon was shining a bright beam of light through a window or a broken place in the dilapidated roof, and that beam picked out the block and tackle hanging from a rafter. I picked my way across the mill and tried to free the rope as quietly as possible, but the pulleys, like everything else, were in disrepair. The wooden wheels stuck, and as they turned, they squeaked. I cursed the miller and his stinking mill under my breath.

  In the end I couldn’t free the rope entirely—the knot that held it to the final pulley was too old and too tight to be undone. I tried to cut the rope with my penknife, but the sun would have risen before I got the small blade through it. Cursing myself for having sold the longer knife, I scooped up the coil of rope I’d pulled free and carried it back toward the well, unwinding it as I went. At the well I dropped the remaining coil through the hole in the cover, hoping it wasn’t too rotten to hold the Attolian’s weight.

  A whispered curse indicated that I should have given him some warning first.

  Down on my knees, I stuck my face back into the well to apologize. There was a whisper of sound beside me, a footfall in the dusty soil, and I pushed myself backward onto my heels just as the miller’s club swung down. It hit the well cover, very near where my head had been, and caught in the rotten wood. I still had my penknife in my hand, and before the miller could wrench his club free, I plunged the little blade into his thigh. It made only a small wound, but I stabbed him again and again. He shouted and struck at me, but his blows landed with little force. He retreated, and I got to my feet.

  Limping heavily, the miller came at me again. I circled away, staying outside the swing of the club, while the miller hurled abuse. “Thief,” he called me. “Stinking thief in my mill. Come to rob me, come to steal, nothing here for you but my club.”

  I held my hands away from my body and said as calmly as I could, “I mean you no harm. I just came back for my friend. I’ve only come back for my friend.”

  “He’s dead!” the miller snarled. “You can’t have him!”

  Intent on hitting me with his club, he had turned his back on the well. He didn’t see the Attolian rising out of it like a mechanical god in a stage play, shining white in the moonlight.

  Oh, dear gods, I thought, he really was dead.

  My stark terror must have been obvious because the miller whirled to face the apparition. Just for a moment we stood frozen: the ghostly Attolian, the miller, and me. Then the club dropped from the miller’s nerveless fingers, and he produced a thin, whistling sound like a wounded toddler without the breath to scream. He tried again. Every breath brought a louder sound as he ran away, wobbling on his wounded leg. Staring back at us over his shoulder, he crashed full on into the wall of a shed and then staggered out of sight, still shrieking.

  The Attolian looked after him, then turned his puzzled expression on me.

  Emotions welled up in me until I was near drowning in them. I reached to touch his warm, living hand and swallowed a laugh and a sob. The Attolian cocked his head as if I were as inexplicable as the miller, but there was no time for explanation. If he was hale enough to climb out of the well, then he was equally capable of running. I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him toward the road, away from the cursed mill and its miller before any others came out to see the apparition and realized that he was no ghost at all, but a man still liberally coated in flour.

  We ran until darkness and the high brush growing beside the road hid the mill from sight. Slowing, I turned to check on the Attolian. He seemed little injured by his fall—he had kept pace with me and appeared in every way whole. He was breathing heavily, b
ut he smiled, realizing what had so frightened the miller.

  “Woo—oo—hooo-o,” he said, floating his hands in the air.

  Something in my chest split then like an overfull wineskin, and I laughed out loud. The two of us stood there clutching ourselves and heaving with laughter. Every time one of us tried to catch his breath, the other would raise up his arms with a “Woo—oo—hooo-o,” and off we would go again like children.

  Finally, afraid that the miller might come to his senses and hear us out on the road, I waved a hand toward the city and, arm in arm, we staggered off. “I’ve still got my sword,” the Attolian said, “but I left the bow in the well.”

  “We aren’t going back for it.”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  I led the way past now-familiar landmarks: the small town, the ditch where I had washed my shirt, the last rise above the city. As the moon dropped toward the horizon, the sun rose—it would be hot later, but the morning was cool and pleasant. I looked forward to the bustle of the city. Then I glanced at the Attolian, surprised to see how far he had fallen behind. My happy spirits settled with a thump.

  “You’re hurt,” I said, walking back to him.

  “I’m fine,” said the Attolian.

  “No, you aren’t,” I said. He’d told me he’d landed on the dog—killing it and breaking his fall. He’d been senseless for a bit afterward but otherwise unharmed. Only now, he walked with his shoulders bowed and a hesitation in his step.

  “I’m fine,” said the Attolian again, more curtly. Then he seemed to rethink. “Actually,” he said, “I am inches from death from a putrid sore throat and you should leave me in the nearest ditch.”

  “What?” I was mystified. “If I wouldn’t leave you in a well, why would I abandon you in a ditch?”

  He looked momentarily as confused as I felt. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was just trying to stop you from worrying and I’ve seen someone else do it that way. Actually, I don’t know why you didn’t leave me in a hole in the ground.” He smiled at me, as if he might have laughed again at the miller, but he was too tired to make the effort. There were marks like bruises under his eyes. I hadn’t seen them before in the dim light. “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Let’s keep going.”