The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Teleus was at his desk writing. There was a tray near his elbow holding bread and cheese as well as an amphora and a wine cup. Relius, the Secretary of the Archives, sat on a stool nearby with another wine cup in his hand. He nodded to Costis. Costis suppressed the shudder that went with a chill down the back of his neck. Teleus continued to write. Costis waited.

  “He’ll try again, you know,” Relius said to the Captain of the Guard, continuing the conversation Costis had interrupted. “When he is more sure of himself, he will move against us both.”

  “If we are valuable servants of the queen, she will preserve us, as she has so far,” said Teleus, checking a schedule and re-inking the nib of his pen.

  “And if we are not valuable?” Relius asked.

  “If we are not valuable, why should she defend us?” Teleus asked.

  Relius sighed. “No one could doubt our value,” he said, “but no man is indispensable. I taught her that myself. Many years ago.” He sipped his wine. “You could leave,” he suggested to Teleus.

  The captain looked up from his work. “So could you,” he responded. “But you won’t, and neither will I.” He went back to his writing.

  Relius stood and placed his wine cup on the tray. He arranged his clothes, easing the creases from the expensive material. He took a moment to smooth his already perfect hair. Then he patted Teleus’s shoulder, smiled at Costis without speaking, and left. Costis waited.

  At last Teleus put down his quill. “You were a year younger than the age limit when I accepted you. I made an exception for you, do you know why?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Another year on your uncle’s farm might have ruined you, and I didn’t want your skills to be wasted. They have been, though, haven’t they? You threw them away.”

  “I am very sorry, sir.”

  “I’d like to think a desire for justice temporarily evicted common sense, but it’s hard to justify attacking someone so incapable of defending himself, however contemptible he may be and,” he added, “however much your comrades might congratulate you for it.”

  Costis opened his mouth, but found no words to speak, and anyway, Teleus held up a hand.

  “Your gear has been shifted to one of the lieutenant’s quarters. The boy will show you which one.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand, Lieutenant?”

  “How can I be a lieutenant, sir?”

  “Because you have been promoted by the king’s whim, far beyond your merits. If the king succeeds in eliminating me, you might be the next Captain of the Guard. It’s a joke, Costis. You are a joke. If you don’t want the king’s joke to be a success, then do your duty, and do it well. No doubt there are other men he will attempt to destroy. We don’t have to make it easy for him. Here is your schedule.” He pushed a paper across the desk. “You will have all the regular duty of a lieutenant as well as dancing attendance on the king. I am damned if I am going to have a lieutenant that doesn’t actually serve as one. Dismissed.”

  Out on the steps, Costis stopped to look at the schedule. He stared at the sheet in consternation. The king hadn’t needed to hang him; he would be dead of exhaustion within the month. He almost turned back to Teleus, but there was no point. His feet carried him slowly down the stairs to the barracks boy who was waiting to show him to his new quarters.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN the morning, Costis got a better idea of what the captain had meant when he had said that the king’s sense of humor was playing itself out. Costis thought it was not humor so much as sheer vindictiveness.

  The training session with the swords was as tedious as the day before. With long, painful pauses, they practiced the early exercises over and over. Afterward, Costis hurried to clean himself in the baths and then went to present himself in the king’s guardroom. He had the day’s passwords and arrived without delay.

  The king had bathed but was not yet dressed.

  The door between the bedchamber and the guardroom was open, and Costis could hear every part of the process of dressing the king, and see most of it. From the conversation, he attached the names he already knew to some of the men waiting on the king. Hilarion, the heavyset attendant, was the second son of a coastal baron. He brought the king the wrong trousers and was sent back to the wardrobe. Dionis, who was the nephew of another baron, brought him the wrong shirt. He was also sent back to the wardrobe, somewhere through a doorway on the opposite side of the guardroom from the king’s bedchamber. Nothing seemed to suit the king, and the attendants passed back and forth across the guardroom with rejected items. At first Costis blamed the king’s vanity, but slowly he realized that this was all a dance enacted by the attendants and directed by Sejanus. The guards on duty watched in amusement. Sejanus winked as he passed Costis with an ink-stained sash.

  The king had chosen a Mede style of dress with a long, open coat over his shirt and tunic. The longer belled sleeves of the coat should have concealed the cuff and hook he had in place of his missing hand, but the coat the attendants brought had been miscut by the tailor. The sleeves were too short. Not only the hook but the entire cuff stuck gracelessly out of the sleeve. The king sent it back.

  Sejanus, smoothly conciliatory to the king’s face, pushed his arms backward into the sleeves of the coat as he was leaving and stared in silent consternation at his arms, sticking out of the shortened sleeves all the way to the elbow. He waggled the fingers on his left hand and then turned in horror to his right hand, where his fingers were bent in the shape of a hook. Snatching at the sleeve with his left hand, he pulled his right hand in until it was hidden, then tucked it under his left arm, hiding it further, and looked around in mock chagrin. Someone in the guardroom, staring in over Costis’s shoulder, choked on a laugh, and the three attendants standing in front of the king, in his view, were suffused and rigid.

  There seemed to be little that the king could do to control his attendants. He might dismiss them from his service, but Costis guessed that dismissing them would only reveal his inability to control them. So Eugenides sat, with his jaws locked, and ignored Sejanus.

  Presently, when he’d been given clothes and been obsequiously helped to dress, the king called Costis. He looked him over closely, as he had the day before.

  “Are you a typical example of the Guard, Costis? I am a little surprised. After all, you aren’t really soldiers, and given that you serve a mostly decorative function, I would have expected you to be more…decorative.”

  Most of the attendants had the kindness to look uncomfortable, knowing that Costis was paying for their transgressions. Hilarion glared at the king, safely out of his line of sight. Sejanus only looked amused. He raised his eyebrows and smiled as if he expected Costis to share the joke.

  In this way, Costis fully realized his new function. He had been elevated from obscurity so that there would be some victim in the pecking order lower than the king.

  If the king hoped to make Costis, and through him the Guard, look foolish, he had chosen the wrong target. That day, and every day, the soldiers of the Guard treated him as a lieutenant, and not as a joke. With the king, he served as the butt of the king’s humor, but the men of the Guard, some veterans twice his age, saluted Costis with pointed rigor and deferentially called him sir. Even Teleus made no distinction between how he treated Costis and how he dealt with his other lieutenants. The attention made Costis uncomfortable at first. He felt like a fraud, but the show of respect was no sham. The Guard wanted him to be a lieutenant, not an imitation of one, and their confidence in him supplied the strength he needed to suffer the king’s company with dignity.

  He had support from another source as well, an anonymous one. He thought it was Sejanus, but had no proof that it was the king’s most successful tormentor that sent a package from time to time with notes on the king’s lessons. The first one arrived the second day of Costis’s new duty. Costis sat in his lieutenant quarters and examined what he’d found waiting for hi
m on the bed. It was a flat package in a cloth wrapper tied with string. A folded note had been slipped under the string.

  “To assist in your lessons,” it said, “from one who wishes you well in your contest.” That, Costis thought, defined his role in no uncertain terms. Whether he wished it or not, he was an opponent of the king.

  Costis opened the cloth wrapping and found a collection of vellum sheets, neatly folded, covered in writing. He carried the paper to the window and read over someone’s detailed notes on the structure of the Mede language. The handwriting was square but uneven, as if the hand that held the quill had been shaking. If it was Sejanus, he had probably been laughing as he wrote. Several pages were covered back and front with vocabulary lists. Costis glanced through the lists, looking for the words the king had quizzed him with the day before. The infinitive of hit and the words for traitor and idiot had been added to the bottom of the list.

  Costis looked back at the note. It was unsigned. The package might have come from one of the king’s instructors, but it was more likely to be one of the king’s attendants. Sejanus was clearly the leader even though the attendant Hilarion was oldest and Philologos, the youngest attendant, an heir to a baron, was the highest in rank. Costis looked over the sheets again. He wished he’d gotten a written explanation of the issues involved in olive production. He thought he would need one.

  “Thank you, Costis,” said the king, dismissing him.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty,” said Costis, dismissed.

  The king crossed through the middle of the training ground and met his attendants on the far side. In a crowd, they passed through an arch and out of sight. As they disappeared, Costis turned for the archway behind him, the king’s exit releasing him from his polite position. The soldiers cleared a path for him, and he hurried. His clothes and gear were waiting for him at the baths. He had just enough time to duck into the cavernous building through a side door, skirt the coldwater plunge, and cut through the steam room to the dressing room beyond. The steam room was usually empty so early in the morning, and the few occupants knew who he was and why he was hurrying. They shouted encouragement instead of curses as he passed through in a draft of cold air.

  Between the steam room and the dressing rooms, a valet waited with a bucket of warm water to dump over him. Costis soaped hastily and was doused again. The valet handed him a cloth, and he dried himself as he headed toward his clothes. With the valet’s help he got dressed as quickly as possible, had his greaves buckled on and his breastplate buckled over his shoulders and under his arms. He bent his head so the man could run a comb through his hair, while he fumbled for a coin, which he couldn’t afford to give away. It was a ritual gesture. The valet waved it away with a smile.

  Sheepishly, Costis dropped it back into the purse hanging from his belt.

  “You are making me famous,” said the man, patting him on the back as he turned him toward the door. “Valet to the King’s Own Guard.”

  Passing between the barracks, Costis ran, holding his sword stable with one hand so that it didn’t bang against his leg, and using the other hand to hold the breastplate so that it would not ride up and chafe under his arms. Once he reached the end of the barracks, he had to drop to a walk, the fastest walk he could manage while maintaining the dignity of Her Majesty’s Guard.

  He climbed up the steps to the upper palace and made his way through the twisting corridors and across atriums under light wells until he reached the last open court before the archway to the terrace. The guard there shook his head. The king had not yet come down to breakfast. Costis turned back to a nearby stairway and waited at the bottom, listening.

  The king timed his morning training precisely. It was still the same dull repetition of basic exercises, and when it had finally dragged to its end, Costis had just enough time to get himself clean, but not enough time to rest in the steam room or even soak himself in the hot baths. The king never cut his time so short that he might be excused if he skipped the wash and came to his post less than perfectly tidy, so Costis rushed. If he was lucky, then Costis got to the king’s chambers before the king had finished his own, rather more elaborate bath and robing. If Costis was late, he could join the king on the breakfast terrace, taking his place unobtrusively by the archway. The king said nothing, though he never failed to notice Costis’s arrival, nor did the queen, who eyed him inscrutably for a moment across the breakfast table whenever he appeared. The very worst mistake Costis could make was to meet the king on the way down. It gave the king a clear, drawn-out opportunity to comment on Costis’s lateness, his dereliction of duty, his inability to meet even the basic requirements of a member of the Royal Guard, and his appearance. If the king did miss an opportunity to complain about his hair, the polish on his buckles, the state of the leather straps—all things that Costis spent hours late into night trying to perfect—Sejanus would draw the king’s attention to the fault. It seemed unlikely behavior from an ally who sent notes on the Mede language and Attolian political history, but Sejanus seemed far more interested in the entertainment of the contest between the king and the guard than in who won it. Sejanus liked his jokes. Costis was growing tired of them.

  After breakfast, the king kissed the queen, a practice Costis still resented, and condescended to be swept off to his daily tutorial in which various counselors and ministers tried desperately to educate him in his responsibilities in spite of his obvious lack of interest.

  The meeting on wheat production seemed to be a recitation of the yield of every wheat field in the country in the last year. Costis tried unsuccessfully to pay attention. They were a half hour into the list when the king asked, “What’s the difference in the wheat?”

  “Excuse me, Your Majesty?”

  “The different kinds of wheat you keep mentioning. What’s the difference?”

  The two men looked at each other. The king waited, leaning back in his chair with one booted ankle crossed over his knee.

  “Pilades would be most helpful. If Your Majesty would excuse us?”

  The king waved one hand, and the two men hurried away and returned with Pilades, a bent older man with wisping white hair and an expression of delight on his wrinkled face.

  “If Your Majesty would like to see, I have samples here.” He reached into a variety of small bags that he was carrying and dumped handful after handful of grain onto the table. Dust rose in a cloud, and the king winced, waving his hand in front of his face. Pilades didn’t notice. He called the king’s attention to the formation of the seeds, to the number of the seeds, to their shape. He dumped more piles onto the table and explained the advantages of each, which one yielded the largest crop, which survived the most inclement weather, which could be planted summer or fall. Many facts Costis knew, having been raised on a farm. Some were new, and the lecture, once begun, was clearly unstoppable.

  The king, who normally wandered away to a window during meetings like this, sat immobilized. He had little choice. If he so much as shifted in his seat, Pilades moved in closer, hovering over him with zeal. No doubt he rarely got a chance to expound to this extent and was reluctant to lose the king’s attention. The king made a few abortive attempts to escape but was ultimately forced to sit and listen.

  Over the king’s head, the counselors and the attendants exchanged glances of awed delight. When Pilades finally wound down, the king, his face blank, thanked him. He thanked the two men he’d begun the meeting with and suggested that perhaps they could finish their business at another meeting, or better—they could just give him a written summary and he would look over it sometime himself. They nodded; the king rose and escaped into the hall. Once there, with the door closed, he put his face in his hand.

  “Thank gods I didn’t ask about fertilizer,” he said.

  Costis almost laughed out loud. A glance told him that the others in the entourage were also amused, but they were smirking at the idea of the king sitting through another lecture. Only Costis shared the king’s vision of the d
edicated Pilades dropping handful after handful of various animal wastes onto the tabletop and discussing their individual merits.

  The king met Costis’s eye and smiled. Costis looked away. When he looked back, the king’s smile was gone as well.

  “Gentlemen, I think I’ve suffered enough for the morning. Pelles, why don’t you tell my next appointment I’m not coming?”

  “Your Majesty is supposed to meet with Baron Meinedes before lunch,” said Sejanus.

  “Well, I am not going to,” said the king. “I’m going back to my room.”

  Pelles bowed and excused himself. The rest started down the hall. At the first intersection of passages the king spoke again. “Directly back to my room, please, gentlemen.”

  Sejanus bowed, offering the king the lead. Eugenides stepped forward. He led the way without hesitation, and Costis wondered how long the king had known that his attendants and his guards led him on a dance of unnecessary twists and turns every time they crossed the palace.

  Certainly the king stepped out confidently ahead of his entourage. When he reached the main passage, he crossed it and then turned down a narrower passage that led to an even narrower staircase. The attendants, who might have been worried that their game had been discovered, began to be amused instead. The king climbed three flights without speaking and stepped into a passage lit by small windows near the roof. There were tiny offices on either side. Startled faces looked out from the doorways, and men walking with scrolls and tablets in their hands froze and then bowed as the king passed. Costis had no idea where they were. He didn’t think the attendants knew either. They all followed the king into an office, then through it and out onto a balcony beyond, and stopped.

  They were at a dead end, looking out over what had once been an interior courtyard that was now a hall, partially roofed over, with a light well in the center. The roof above their head was supported on rafters that butted into the balcony at their feet.