Thick as Thieves

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “All of it,” said the Attolian.

  I stopped in my tracks as he kept on walking.

  “So?” I asked when I’d caught up with him. It hadn’t been much, but to Godekker it was no doubt an eye-popping amount and all we’d had to feed ourselves with.

  He nodded. “So, so, so.”

  “The trade house is closed because of the plague rumors,” I reminded him.

  “There will be an Attolian ship in the harbor,” he said confidently.

  “I didn’t see one.”

  “You can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

  My eyesight was not that bad. “If there are none?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, still smiling.

  “So we will burn that bridge when we come to it?” I asked, and he laughed as he threw one arm over my shoulder. If Godekker had betrayed us, he’d undeniably saved us first. I said, “Maybe he’ll help some other runaway.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Do you think Godekker will have us back?” the Attolian asked.

  “Not if he thinks he already has all our money,” I said. Godekker might turn over a compassionate new leaf, but I doubted he would ever be any friend of ours.

  There had been no Attolian ships in the inner harbor, and we had moved out to the docks beyond the city walls. Zaboar wasn’t the trading city that Sukir was, but its docks were usually busy. Larger vessels came in from the Middle Sea and smaller ones traded up and down the coast of the Shallow Sea—collecting goods to resell at Zaboar, or buying in Zaboar to resell to smaller ports where the ships with a deeper draft could not go. Rumors of plague had reduced traffic, though. We had worked our way about half the length of the waterfront without finding an Attolian ship and were pausing for a rest. Two bollards, cast iron mushrooms cemented to the stone quay, provided mooring for the nearest ship and seating for us. As we looked ahead, it was clear we were running out of options—the tail end of the waterfront was mostly smaller local boats.

  The day was warm, the sun breaking on the top of every wave in the harbor. There were a few clouds that proceeded across the sky like errant parasols, giving us brief moments of much-appreciated shade before moving on. I thought how pleasant it would be to move to one of the wineshops on the waterfront and sit there, watching all the traffic go by, but we had no money, and I couldn’t forget that the Attolian was still recovering. He might yet be picked up as a plague victim. That he was on the mend was obvious to me but might not be so to a health inspector. As well as Godekker, there were the enforcers of the peace to consider. Gods forbid we ran into any of them out in the open air.

  The Attolian got back to his feet, saying, “Onward then.” I tried again to convince him to stay while I went and found a ship.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted, and when I looked at him skeptically, offered a more honest assessment. “I’m not fine, but I’m good enough for another few ships.”

  So we walked on until we came to a shabby little caravel, with a dolphin in peeling paint on its stern. A sailor told us it had an Attolian captain. “Though the crew comes from here and there.” It was not the most prepossessing vessel, but as I said, we were reaching the end of the docks and the end of our options.

  The Attolian led the way up the plank to the deck and spoke to a sailor there. Much to my surprise, when the captain appeared the Attolian pulled the ring from his ear and held it out.

  “This is the private seal of Attolis Eugenides,” he said.

  Well, thank the eternal gods he hadn’t swallowed it.

  The black cylinder of stone that had dangled from his ear since we had left Ianna-Ir was not flat on the bottom as I had assumed, but engraved—evidently with the king’s seal. The carving was much too small for me to make out, and I had to resist the impulse to bend over it to get a better look. The captain reached for the seal, but the Attolian pulled it back.

  “I die before it leaves my hand,” he warned, and the captain slowly nodded his understanding.

  “We need passage home,” said the Attolian.

  “We are headed east,” said the captain. “I can take you on board, but we will not see Sukir again for three or four months. It will be half a year before we are back in Attolia.”

  “We need passage now,” said the Attolian.

  “Find another ship,” said the captain. He looked out over the water, as if one might rise up out of the brightly twinkling waves.

  “Our king will pay you well,” offered the Attolian.

  The captain rolled his eyes. “Well enough to compensate me for the loss of trade on a six-month trip?” he asked, not believing it.

  The Attolian nodded. I was quite impressed with his air of command. Even more impressed because he was still pale from illness, with dark circles under his eyes and his clothes quite filthy after his stay in Godekker’s garbage pen.

  The captain hesitated. Locking eyes with the Attolian, he weighed the dangers of failing us if what the Attolian said was true, if we did indeed travel under the private seal of the king.

  “Very well,” said the captain at last, and I let go of my breath. “I will take you as far as Sukir.”

  The Attolian opened his mouth, but the captain raised a hand to forestall him. “We will take this seal of yours to the trade house in Sukir and see if they verify it. Maybe you can find a better ship there. I am captain, not captain-owner, and I won’t go farther than Sukir without more proof than some carved seal I have never seen or heard of before. I warn you, those who own this ship are powerful enough to hunt you down if this is fraud.”

  “They won’t need to,” the Attolian assured him.

  The captain shouted for his bosun then and ordered the crew recalled from the shore.

  The Attolian was unhappy—he stood at the ship’s rail and glowered at the passing waves as we sailed. He’d wanted to bypass Sukir, saying we’d spent too much effort getting out of the empire to step back into it so easily, but I was secretly relieved. In Sukir, it would be easy to disappear. Twice the size of the Zaboar’s capital city, it has twice the chaos to get lost in, and because it was on the north side of the Black Straits, I could slip away overland. I wouldn’t need to pay passage on a ship to get me away from the empire. I did not want to leave the Attolian, but once he knew of my master’s death, our brief friendship would be over. He might hear the rumors in Sukir, and he would certainly know the truth when we reached Attolia. I could not accompany him there, no matter what. I’d made a fool of a ruler so petty he’d stolen another man’s slave for spite, so profligate he’d waste the profits of a six-month trading trip to have what he wanted. He wasn’t going to free me, and might well kill me for it. I had to pray that because the Attolian was a favorite, he would be safe.

  Even if the Attolian king didn’t kill me, I wouldn’t live long in his city. The news of my presence there would travel back to the emperor like an arrow shot from a bow, and when the Little Peninsula fell to the Medes, they would be looking for me. Bounty hunters might well arrive before that. Attolia was no safe place for me. I needed to leave the Attolian and the empire far behind, and as the days passed, I planned. I needed no cap, as Godekker did, to pass as a free man—I just needed to show a little more confidence. After asking the captain’s permission, I had helped myself to some of his paper and pens. With those, I would be able to prove my worth to any merchant in the city of Sukir. It would not take long to find an employer who needed a trustworthy scribe to travel to a distant city and work his ledgers there. I could go as far as Mûr on the Black River or farther north to Oncevar.

  We came to Sukir late in the evening. The Attolian had asked me to stay in our cabin during the time we spent there, and I’d agreed. We didn’t know if the empire believed me dead in a rockfall, and even if the empire was unaware that I still lived, we didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. I sat in the cabin, the Attolian beside me, and listened to the clatter and bang of the sails and blocks as we glided over the lowered chain into the harbor.
It has always amazed me that something made out of cloth can make so much noise when it flaps, like cannon-shot or a lightning strike from a clear sky. Through the small round porthole, I looked out at a hundred ships moored around us, silhouettes against the orange and pink and translucent blue sky. Sukir is the largest of the empire’s ports, larger even than Iannis at the Ianna river delta.

  Navigating into a crowded harbor is a ticklish business, but the evening breeze was gentle, and the captain skillfully eased his way to a mooring and ordered anchors dropped. We slowly swung into alignment with the other ships as the sails were gathered in. Then we waited for the harbormaster’s boat to come alongside, as it eventually did—when there was almost no light left to see by—to ask the captain’s business.

  The captain’s business had been a point of contention. The Attolian wanted to leave as quickly as possible—we would not change ships, and once the seal was verified, we would rely instead on the Dolphin to take us the rest of the way. The captain was not thrilled with this plan—at the very least, he wanted to dump his cargo on the market at Sukir, to offset the costs of his commandeering. The Attolian had refused to permit it, afraid that people would ask questions about the unusual activity. Again I was taken by surprise by his confidence and his air of command. That he was more sure of himself in his native tongue was one explanation, but I think it was also the effect of the king’s seal. When he held it in his hand, he did not doubt that he spoke for the king and that the king’s authority was incontestable. Anyone could see it in his face, and I think his respect for that trivially small carved stone, more than anything else, persuaded the captain. Or perhaps it was just the obverse side of being such a terrible liar—his honesty was easy to believe in.

  The captain might have accepted the Attolian’s authority, but he still fought his losses. He’d argued that docking in Sukir and not doing business would be more likely to attract unwanted attention. Ultimately, he and the Attolian had worked out a story that would explain the unexpected arrival of the Dolphin in the harbor at Sukir—a change in the ship’s ownership that required an immediate return home—and would permit the captain to sell off a part of his cargo, even if it wasn’t at the best possible price. This was the fiction that the captain related to the harbormaster.

  In the morning the ship was moved to the dock to offload whatever cargo the captain would be able to sell and take on whatever he could for the trip to Attolia. I pretended to yawn when the sailor knocked at our cabin door to inform us that the captain was ready for the walk to the Attolian trade house to present the king’s seal. When the king took the throne, the imprint of that seal had been sent out on documents everywhere the Attolians traded. Unlike the public seals, only a handful of people would have seen it at each house, but it would have been carefully stored for just such occasions as this one.

  “Sleep in,” said the Attolian, already up and meticulously tidy, as if he were going to see the king himself. It was unusual for me to still be lying down and he’d asked earlier if I was ill.

  “Just tired,” I told him and I did feel tired, as if I were being pressed into the bunk by a tremendous weight.

  “We won’t be long,” he assured me.

  I lay listening until I was certain the Attolian had left the ship, then forced myself up. I pulled on a clean tunic, borrowed from one of the sailors, and carefully folded the dirty one out of habit. I wouldn’t be taking it, or any of my clothing, with me. I took only my penknife and the pens and paper from the captain, secured in a roll. I looked around, seeing that everything was tidy, and then I left.

  I made my way up the narrow stairwell to the deck of the ship. The morning sun was still on the slant and the sailors busy with predictable tasks. Trundling about the cargo that the captain still hoped to sell, they had no attention to spare on me. I nodded hastily to a sailor by the gangplank as I trotted past, as if trying to catch up to the men who had left earlier, and he never gave me a second glance.

  Leaving the waterfront, I didn’t dare take the larger avenues. I dodged into the more inviting side streets, forgetting that they weren’t as familiar to me as the narrow byways of Ianna-Ir. Sukir for all of its size and wealth was similar to many small coastal towns in that it was deliberately difficult to navigate. The rough stone streets turning in hairpins and intersecting at odd angles all looked alike. Pirates who attacked the vulnerable towns on the coast rarely made it very far into their mazes before being thoroughly turned around and dumped back out on the waterfronts. Sukir hadn’t had a pirate attack in my lifetime, but it still had the streets to thwart one.

  Soon enough, I was praying that I hadn’t gotten myself hopelessly lost. Never would I have guessed I could have so much fellow feeling for pirates. Twice I found myself back at the docks where I had started, as if the gods had cursed my wandering feet. Frantic, I set out a third time, risking a wider road, hurrying along it until I saw a glimpse of the city wall and turned toward it. Following the street along its base, I thought I must eventually reach a gate.

  I had my head down, berating myself for an idiot, and I looked up only moments before crashing straight into the Attolian standing amused in front of me.

  He laughed at my surprise. “Were you worried we were taking too long?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said breathlessly. “Yes, you’ve been gone awhile.”

  He shook his head, disgusted. “The traders took forever to find someone with the authority to verify the seal. He had to be called in from his home, but he checked the dispatches and gave the go-ahead at last. The captain is over the moon to know that the king is going to pay him. We were just on our way back.”

  “I see,” I said. “That’s good.”

  The Attolian put a hand on my shoulder and turned me around.

  “You shouldn’t have come out after us,” he said. “It’s still dangerous. We don’t even know for certain that the Namreen found that body in the rockslide.”

  The captain, the Attolian, and I walked back to the docks. The curving streets led us right to our ship as though the gods themselves had paved our way.

  The captain was indeed in fine spirits and eager to treat us in style. The second mate was turned out of his cabin so that the Attolian and I needn’t continue to share. The captain apologized for the tiny size of the cabin, but it was a blessing just to be alone. I could pray without the Attolian’s asking why I was wringing my hands and what I was muttering under my breath. I promised a lifetime of dedications to a terrifying number of gods if they would just turn the ship away from Attolia. I prayed for storm and shipwreck. I prayed for a water supply gone bad or tanks holed so that we could put into a port for resupply. I prayed for plague or pirates. The only thing I didn’t pray for was a ship full of Namreen. Nonetheless, we sailed untroubled from Sukir down the Black Straits to the Sea in the Middle of the World and then across it.

  I couldn’t bear to look the Attolian in the face. I couldn’t risk him reading my thoughts, so I told him the motion of the waves out on the Middle Sea made me sick, and I stayed in the cabin. He, of course, came to sit with me, and I had to lie still and pretend I was asleep.

  “Kamet, wake up,” said the Attolian one morning, and showed me the pennant he’d asked the ship’s sailmaker to sew. A black line made an oval around four oddly formed letters. “It’s supposed to be Hamiathes’s Gift,” he said. “When we reach the Thegmis Channel, we will fly it from the mast. No one but the king and I know what it means, but when they see it at the fort on the mainland, they’ve been told to send a man on a fast horse to the capital. The king will know we are coming.”

  I didn’t know what Hamiathes’s Gift was, and I didn’t care, either. “How long until we see Thegmis?” I asked.

  “Only a day or two now,” he assured me. Then he asked if I wanted something to eat, and when I said no, he finally left.

  I didn’t want anything to eat. I wanted to die. I would have thrown myself overboard into the sea if I’d thought it would have kept the A
ttolian from ever knowing that I had betrayed him and I prayed to Prokip, god of justice, that punishment for my deceit would fall on my shoulders, not his. At night I lay awake thinking about what the Attolian king might do. Throw me in a prison cell or kill me or send me back to the empire. Maybe he would sell me off to one of his barons in need of a record keeper. I had once had ambitions to run the empire—and the best I could hope for was that I might end my life in the wilderness counting sheep.

  When the island of Thegmis lay ahead of us, I climbed up on the deck to see the pennant raised.

  “My god, Kamet, you look terrible,” the Attolian said. “Go back and lie down.”

  So I looked out the porthole in my cabin, and I thought of our upcoming reception in Attolia as we passed under the cliffs of Thegmis, no more than a stone’s throw from shore. I wished for the hundred thousandth time that I could swim. I could read and write in five languages. I could multiply and divide in my head, track a hennat out of place through an entire year’s expense records, and turn a feather into a perfect pen with two cuts of my knife, but I could not swim.

  We neared the capital as the sun was setting, and I returned to the deck to face the future. Everything was shining in the sun’s dying rays—the headlands, the temples, the ordinary buildings of what I knew for a fact was a rather dingy city. The marble palace of Attolia, as we rounded the headland, glowed like another sun itself, but as we drew nearer, the shadow of Thegmis, lurking offshore, crept up from the sea to swallow first the port, then the city, then the palace. By the time we passed the lighthouse at the end of the mole, only the temples on the heights were still in the sun, and heading toward us at top speed were two of Attolia’s war galleys.

  The Attolian was puzzled. “We were supposed to get into the city without anyone knowing we’d arrived. Why would they send out war galleys?”

  Before my hands could cover my treacherous mouth, the words fell out. “Because my master is dead—there’s no need for secrecy now.”