The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “You sound very learned, Gen. What do you know about it?” asked the magus.

  I sat up and moved to the fire before I answered him. “My mother was from the mountain country. It’s no different there. Everybody goes to the temple, and everybody likes to hear the old stories after dinner, but that doesn’t mean they expect a god to show up at their door.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” I said, letting my tongue run away from me. “And you made a lot of mistakes. You aren’t even pronouncing the name of the country right. The people on the mountains call it Eeddis, not Eddis. And you left out the part where the Earth cries when the Sky God ignores her and turns the oceans to salt.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, I told you, my mother told me the stories when I was little. I know them all, and I know that they call the country Eeddis.”

  “As for that, Gen, I can tell you that Eeddis is the old pronunciation used before the invaders came. We’ve changed the pronunciation of many of our words since the time of the invaders, while Eddisian pronunciations haven’t altered for centuries. Eddis is pronounced differently now, whatever the people of that country say.”

  “It’s their country,” I grumbled. “They ought to know the right name for it.”

  “It isn’t that Eeddis is the wrong name, Gen. It’s just an old way of saying the same word. The rest of the civilized world has moved on. Tell me what other mistakes I made.”

  I told him as many as I’d noticed. Most of the mistakes were bits of the story that he had left out.

  When I was done, he said, “It’s always interesting to hear different versions of people’s folktales, Gen, but you shouldn’t think that your mother’s stories are true to the original ones. I’ve studied them for many years and am sure that I have the most accurate versions. It often happens that emigrants like your mother can’t remember parts of the original, so they make things up and then forget that the story was ever different. Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.”

  “My mother never debased anything in her entire life,” I said hotly.

  “Oh, don’t be offended,” the magus said. “I’m sure she never meant to, but your mother wasn’t educated. Uneducated people rarely know much about the things they talk about every day. She probably never even knew that your name, Gen, comes from the longer name Eugenides.”

  “She did, too,” I insisted. “You’re the one that doesn’t know anything. You never knew my mother, and you don’t know anything about her.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course I know about her. She fell from a fourth-story window of Baron Eructhes’s villa and died when you were ten years old.”

  The wind sighed in the pine needles over my head. I’d forgotten that that was written in the pamphlet that was my criminal record. The king’s courts were apt to have a pickpocket’s entire life story written in tiny handwriting on a collection of paper sheets folded together in the prison’s record room.

  The magus saw that he had cut deep and went on. His voice dripped condescension. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Gen is a family name. The title of King’s Thief is a hereditary one now in Eddis, and I think the current Thief is named Eugenides. Maybe you’re related. A cousin, perhaps, to someone exalted.” He snickered. I could feel my face burning and knew that I was red right to the hairline.

  “Eugenides,” I nearly stuttered, “was the god of thieves. We are all named after him.” I jumped up from the fire and stamped back to the blanket that was mine. The night was cool, so I wrapped up in the wool cloak and admitted to myself that the magus had gotten the better of me in that exchange. Everyone else seemed to agree.

  The magus was as smug as a cat the next day. Pol made breakfast, and then we packed up, careful to leave no sign of our presence beside the trail. Sophos and Ambiades collected pine needles to cover the burnt space of our cooking fire. By noon we had reached the other side of the mountain ridge and were looking at our descent.

  “I am not going down that until I’ve had lunch,” I announced. “I have no intention of dying on an empty stomach.” I was flip but perfectly serious, and when the magus tried to force me, I balked. He cuffed me on the head with his seal ring, but I wouldn’t budge. I was going to rest before I started down a shale slope where I would need not only my balance but all the strength that the king’s prison had left in my legs. I dug in my heels and wouldn’t move. We had lunch.

  After lunch we started down the mountainside. I wanted to go last, but Pol wouldn’t let me. I went second to last and only had to worry about the rocks that Pol kicked down. The magus, who went first, had Pol’s rocks as well as mine, Sophos’s, and Ambiades’s. I sent down a few especially for him but felt bad when Sophos caught one of the rocks that Pol kicked loose squarely in the back of the head. None of us could stop to see if he was badly hurt until we’d reached the end of the flysch. It was about seventy-five feet to the bottom of it, and as soon as we were safely on solid rock, Pol checked Sophos.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” said Sophos, but his eyes were still watering. “It’s not bleeding.” He kept looking at his hand to be sure. Pol rubbed the bump rising on the back of his head and agreed that he would probably live.

  “I regret that,” he said, and seemed very serious about his apology for something he could not have prevented. “Do you need to rest for a while?”

  “We could have a second lunch,” I suggested, and received a glare from the magus.

  Sophos said he was fine, so we started again. There was no streambed here to follow, at least not at first. We walked across the side of the mountain on a goat path between rocks. I felt very exposed and worried about who might be watching from above. The last thing I wanted was to be caught hiking across Eddis with the king’s magus of Sounis, and we could not have been more visible, five people traipsing through vegetation no higher than our knees. I asked the magus why the secrecy in the morning when anyone passing could see us in the open.

  “Only someone else on this trail,” he said. “And the trail is rarely used. As long as we don’t leave any permanent signs, no one will know that we passed here. There are better ways to get down to Attolia.”

  I looked up at the rubble above and said, “I bet there are. Can’t we be seen from the forest?”

  “No, it’s unlikely that anyone would be there.”

  I snorted. “A successful thief doesn’t depend on things being unlikely to happen,” I said.

  “A successful thief?” said the magus. “How would you know?”

  I retired chagrined from the field of contest.

  After a quarter of a mile we picked our way down a particularly steep slope and came to a tiny plateau, paved with flagstones and edged with ancient olive trees. At the back of the plateau, really no more than a deep ledge, a cave led into the mountainside. Growing out of a cleft in the stone above the cave, a fig tree shaded its opening. A spring welled up somewhere in the dark and ran out through a tiled channel in the pavement. Beside the channel was a tiny temple, no more than ten feet high, built from blocks of marble, with miniature marble pillars in front.

  “Behold,” said the magus with a sweep of his hand, “the place where we were supposed to have lunch. Take a quick look, Sophos. It’s your first heathen temple.” He explained that it was an altar to the goddess of the spring that rose in the cave. It had probably been built as much as a thousand years earlier. He showed him the craftsmanship that went into dressing the marble, so that each stone fit perfectly against the others.

  “Looking at a small temple like this, you can see how the larger temples were fitted together. Everything is in scale. If there are four pieces to each column in the main temple of the river gods, then there are four pieces to each column here, and all the joining will be the same.” Sophos was as fascinated as the magus. The two of them went into the temple to see the figure of the goddess
and came out looking impressed. Ambiades was bored.

  The magus saw his expression and said, “So, Ambiades, knowing someone’s religion can help you manipulate that person, which is why Sophos’s father thinks no country should have more than one set of gods. Let me give you some examples.”

  We started down the path that the water from the spring had carved during the last millennium. It was an easy hike. There were even steps carved into the stone at the steep places, no doubt by a thousand years of worshipers at the shrine above us. As we walked, Ambiades listened with interest to the magus. It was obvious that he paid close attention to anything that he thought might be useful to him. He just didn’t see the point in natural history.

  The magus began to ask questions. For a long time Ambiades answered each one; then Sophos began answering, and Ambiades’s comments became more and more sullen. I tried to listen, but only bits and pieces floated back up the trail. After Ambiades had snarled at Sophos a few times, the magus sent Sophos to walk in the back and lectured to Ambiades alone. I was surprised to hear Sophos and Pol behind me chatting like old friends. Pol wanted to know what had set off Ambiades.

  “Identifying mountain ranges. He doesn’t like that sort of thing, so he doesn’t pay attention. But even so, he knows more than I do.”

  “You’ll catch up.”

  “I suppose, if my father lets me stay.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know what I mean, Pol. If he finds out I want to stay, he’ll take me away.”

  “And do you want to stay?”

  “Yes,” said Sophos quite firmly. “I like learning, and the magus isn’t as frightening as I thought at first.”

  “No? Shall I tell him you said so?”

  “Don’t you dare. And don’t tell my father either. You know my father is hoping he’ll toughen me up. Don’t you think the magus is nicer than he seems at first?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said Pol.

  “Well, he isn’t nearly as hard on me as he is on Ambiades.”

  “Leaves that to Ambiades, I notice,” said Pol.

  “Oh, I don’t mind, Pol. I like Ambiades. He’s smart, and he’s not usually so…so—”

  “High-handed?” Pol supplied the word.

  “Temperamental,” said Sophos. “I think something is bothering him.” He changed the subject. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  I pricked up my ears.

  “Attolia,” said Pol, which was nothing more than the obvious at that point.

  “Is that all you know? Then why are you here?”

  “Your father sent me to keep an eye on you. Toughen you up.”

  Sophos laughed. “No, really, why?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “I’ll bet the magus needed someone reliable, and Father said he couldn’t have you without me.”

  I bet he was right.

  We came to a steep place and had to scramble. Once we’d worked our way down, Pol dropped behind Sophos, effectively ending their conversation. Sophos moved up beside me.

  “Are you really named after the god of thieves?” “I am.”

  “Well, how could they tell what you were going to be when you were just a baby?”

  “How did they know what you were going to be when you were a baby?”

  “My father was a duke.”

  “So my mother was a thief.”

  “So you would have to grow up to be one, too?”

  “Most of the people in my family thought so. My father wanted me to be a soldier, but he’s been disappointed.”

  Behind us I heard Pol grunt. He no doubt thought my father’s disappointment was justified.

  “Your father? He did?”

  Sophos sounded so surprised that I looked over at him and asked, “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Oh, well, I mean…” Sophos turned red, and I wondered about the circulation of his blood; maybe his body kept an extra supply of it in his head, ready for blushing.

  “What surprises you?” I asked. “That my father was a soldier? Or that I knew him? Did you think that I was illegitimate?”

  Sophos opened and closed his mouth without saying anything.

  I told him that no, I wasn’t illegitimate. “I even have brothers and sisters,” I told him, “with the same father.” Poor Sophos looked as if he wanted the ground to swallow him.

  “What do they do?” he finally asked.

  “Well, one of my brothers is a soldier, and the other brother is a watchmaker.”

  “Really? Can he make those new watches that are flat instead of round in the back?” He seemed interested, and I was going to tell him that Stenides had made his first flat watch about two years ago, but the magus noticed Sophos talking to me and called him away.

  As Sophos pulled ahead, I said loudly, “My sisters are even married, and honest housewives to boot.” At least they were mostly honest.

  The valley eroded by the spring never deepened enough to be called a gorge. Its sides curved gently away from us, and only in a few places was the going stony. As we descended, we could see Attolia stretched out ahead of us, and to the right the sea. Dotted across the horizon, islands continued the mountain range behind us. On the far side of the Attolian valley was another mountain range, and out of that came the Seperchia River. It wandered along the plain, sometimes nearer to the Hephestial Mountains, sometimes many miles away. Just before it reached the coast, it bumped against a rocky spur of the foothills and was diverted into the Hephestial range itself. There the mountains were soft limestone, and the river had cut a pass down to Sounis to flow past the king’s city and finally into the middle sea.

  “It’s much greener than home, isn’t it?” Sophos commented to no one in particular.

  He was quite right. Where the view of Sounis had been brown and baked gold, this country was shades of green. Even the olive trees, planted below us, were a richer color than the silver gray trees on the other side of the range.

  “They get the easterly winds that dump their rain when they hit the mountains,” the magus explained. “Attolia gets nearly twice as much rain every year as we do.”

  “They export wine, figs, olives, and grapes as well as cereals. They have pastureland to support their own cattle, and they don’t import sheep from Eddis,” Ambiades said knowledgeably, and the magus laughed.

  “Gods, you were paying attention!”

  I thought at first that Ambiades was going to smile, but he scowled instead and didn’t speak until we stopped for the night, and then it was only to berate Sophos. It was strange behavior for someone who had been so contented by the fire the night before. I couldn’t see why Sophos liked him, but it was obvious that he did. Worshiped might be a better word. All he needed to do was build a miniature temple and get Ambiades to stand on the altar.

  I guessed that Ambiades was usually more pleasant company. The magus didn’t seem likely to tolerate prolonged sullenness in an apprentice, and it seemed to me that he thought highly of Ambiades even if he did call him a fool from time to time.

  After dinner Sophos asked if there were other stories about the gods, and the magus began the story of Eugenides and the Sky God’s Thunderbolts but stopped almost immediately.

  “He’s your patron god,” he said to me. “Why don’t you tell Sophos who he is?”

  I don’t know what he expected me to say, but I told the entire story as I had learned it from my mother, and he didn’t interrupt.

  THE BIRTH OF EUGENIDES,

  GOD OF THIEVES

  It had been many years since the creation of man, and he had multiplied across the land. One day as Earth walked through her forests, she met a woodcutter. His axe lay beside him on the ground, and he wept.

  “Why weep, woodcutter?” Earth asked him. “I see no hurt.”

  “Oh, Lady,” said the woodcutter, “my hurt is overwhelming because it is someone else’s pain that makes me cry.”

  “What pain?” asked Earth, and the woodcutter explained that he and his wife
wished to have children, but they had none, and this made his wife so sad that she sat in her house and wept. And the woodcutter, when he thought of his wife’s tears, wept, too.

  Earth brushed the tears from his cheeks and told him to meet her again in the forest in nine days, and in that time she would bring him a son.

  The woodcutter went home and told his wife what had happened, and in nine days he went again into the forest to meet the goddess there. She asked, “Where is your wife?”

  The woodcutter explained that she hadn’t come. It is one thing to meet the Goddess in the forest and another thing to convince your wife that you have done so. His wife thought her husband had lost his mind, and she wept all the more.

  “Go,” said Earth, “and tell your wife to come tomorrow, or she will have no child and no husband and no home either when the day is done.”

  So the woodcutter went home to his wife and pleaded with her to come to the forest, and to please him, she agreed. So the next day she was with her husband, and Earth asked her, “Have you a cradle?”

  And the woman said no. It is one thing to humor your husband, who has suddenly gone crazy, but it is something else to let all the neighbors know that he is crazy by asking to borrow a cradle for a baby he says that you are going to get from the Goddess.

  “Go,” said Earth, “and get a cradle and small clothes and blankets, or you will have no child and no husband and no home by this time tomorrow.”

  So the woodcutter and his wife went to their neighbors, and the neighbors were good people. They gave to the woodcutter and his wife the things they said they needed, and they asked no questions because it was perfectly clear to them that their neighbors had lost their wits.

  The next day in the forest when Earth asked, “Have you a cradle?” the woodcutter and his wife said, “Yes.”

  “Have you small clothing?”

  They said, “Yes.”

  “And blankets? And all the things you will need for a baby?” and they said yes, and Earth showed them the baby in her arms. And the woodcutter’s wife came close to her, and she said, “Have you a name for him?”