The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Costis approached slowly, careful to scuff a little as he stepped. He didn’t want to startle the king.

  “Costis,” said Eugenides, without turning around, “I should have realized they would drag you out of bed. I apologize.”

  He swung around then with a little stagger that made Costis’s heart leap into his throat.

  Head down, swinging the wineskin by the leather thong at its neck, the king walked along the crenellation. Costis paced beside him.

  “Your Majesty, please get down,” Costis said hurriedly. The king was almost at the end of the crenellation, and he dreaded what would happen when he got there.

  “Why? Costis, I’m not going to fall.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Not that drunk,” said the king. “Watch.” He tossed the wineskin to Costis, who caught it and clutched it in horror as the king turned himself upside down and balanced, one hand on the narrow ridge of the stone.

  “Oh, my god,” said Costis.

  “O my god,” said the king, cheerfully. “You want to call on the god appropriate to the occasion. After all, your god would probably be Miras, light and arrows and all that sort of thing, whereas my god is a god of balance and, of course, preservation of Thieves, which I suppose, technically, I am not.” He straightened up. “Maybe I shouldn’t push my luck,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Costis said faintly. “Your god might be offended.”

  “Costis, my god is not a ten-devotee-to-the-average-dozen, got-a-priest-on-every-corner kind of god who is always being badgered by his worshipers. He keeps a very close eye on me, and what may look completely stupid to you is merely a demonstration of my faith. Give me back my wine.”

  Remembering the way the king’s cousin had dealt with him, Costis held out the wineskin. The king reached for it, but he guessed Costis’s intent and pulled his hand back before Costis could catch him to yank him to safety. The king laughed like a little boy and windmilled his arms for balance.

  “Costis,” he said with mocking disappointment, “that’s cheating.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “I am not sure I trust you.”

  “You can trust me with your life, My King.”

  “But not with my wine, obviously. Give it back.”

  “Get down and make me.”

  The king laughed again. “Aulus would be so proud of you, and Ornon, too. You are a quick learner.”

  But Costis didn’t have Aulus’s size, or his history with the king, and Aulus had been dealing with a very sick, bedridden Eugenides. Costis had none of his advantages.

  The king chuckled in the dark, a warm sound that Costis couldn’t help responding to, though he was immediately exasperated with himself as well as the king.

  “I’ve been thinking. Don’t you want to know what I have been thinking about?”

  “Only if you are thinking about getting down,” said Costis, his exasperation showing.

  “Is this a sense of humor, Costis?”

  “I do have one, Your Majesty.”

  “Good for you,” said the king. He started to walk back the way he had come. Costis followed, still clutching the wineskin.

  “Your Majesty, please get down. My friend Aris is really a very good man, and if you fall off that wall, he’s going to hang for it, and so will his squad, most of whom are also nice men, and though I can’t say I really care if your attendants hang, there are probably many people that do care, and would you please, please, get down?”

  The king looked at him, eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that many words in a row. You sounded almost articulate. I was thinking of Nahuseresh,” said the king, getting back to his subject. He looked over his shoulder at Costis. “Do you know, you can’t strangle a man with one hand?” he said very seriously. “It’s probably why I have only one. It narrows one’s options. I may make a poor king with one hand, but the gods know I’d be no king at all if I had two.”

  “Your Majesty…”

  The king rubbed his hand over his face. “And I was just thinking of you, and here you are, you poor silly bastard, trying to tell me to get down off this wall.”

  He swung around again, walked the length of the crenellation, and before Costis had time to draw breath to protest, he hopped neatly to the next.

  “You present me with a difficulty, Costis, as I owe you something better than what you are in line for now—death by falling roof tile.”

  Diverted, Costis said, “That was an accident,” and reconsidered even as he spoke. The old broken tiles could easily have been scattered on the ground beforehand. Broken roof tiles were easy to come by in every trash pile around the palace.

  The king turned his whole body to look at Costis, swaying for a moment before he balanced.

  “How did you know about the roof tiles?” Costis asked.

  “I am omniscient, I know everything. Or at least I did before I had to tow four attendants, a squad of guards, a guard leader, and a stray lieutenant around behind me wherever I go. To be honest,” the king admitted, “I didn’t know. You just told me. All I had was an educated guess because it’s a fairly common form of assassination. There’s the true course of political savvy for you, good guesses. Tell me, in the course of your blundering innocence, have you noticed any other attempts on your life?”

  Costis thought a moment. “Yes,” he said, hesitantly, “maybe.” He convinced himself—surprised at how little effort it took. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” agreed the king. “It’s a dangerous thing to be seen as the confidant of a king. Knife fights in wineshops, aggressive drunks, and a stray arrow at the butts. Any others?”

  “Are those guesses, too?” Costis stared in disbelief.

  “No.”

  “You are omniscient.”

  The king shook his head. “I asked Relius for the names of two competent men to keep an eye on you. I couldn’t keep you in the guardroom for the rest of your natural life. And you, you stupid bastard, had already wandered away once and gotten under a load of roof tiles.”

  “What men?”

  “You met one after the knife fight in front of the wineshop.”

  Costis remembered the stranger.

  “Their powers are limited, however. They can watch, but sometimes there’s not a damn thing they can do. It was just luck the arrow missed you. So, so, so,” said the king. “I had hoped that your very obvious outrage at being dropped like a used glove would have protected you, but obviously it hasn’t.

  “I could hide you in the hinterlands, but frankly, I don’t know enough people that I trust in Attolia. I could call on my cousin who is Eddis and ask her to hide you, but even more frankly, I will admit that having to do so would be embarrassing.” He looked over at Costis and said, “I hate being embarrassed.” He rubbed his side, and Costis knew he was thinking of Sejanus. “I saw him on that balcony, and I sat there like an idiot wondering what he was doing.” He shook his head in self-disgust and moved along the wall. Costis followed after him.

  “I hope you know that I could once jump from the palace to those roofs over there.” He eyed the empty space below him and said sadly, “If I tried now, I’d probably eviscerate myself when I landed. But it does give me an idea for what to do with you. In the morning I will tell Teleus that I am detaching you from the Guard. You won’t like it,” he informed Costis unsympathetically, “but then, you shouldn’t have hit me in the face…all those many lifetimes ago.”

  It did feel as if lifetimes had passed since Costis had knocked the king down in the training yard. That was some other soldier, a simpleminded one with no idea how complicated life could become.

  “Really,” said the king, “I’ve gotten a lot of thinking done tonight. In spite of my entourage.”

  “Is that what the wine is for? To help you think?”

  “Oh, the wine. The wine, Costis, is to help hide the truth. It doesn’t work. It never has, but I try it every once in a while just in cas
e something in the nature of wine might have changed.”

  “The truth, Your Majesty?”

  The king cocked his head at him. “I’m not going to tell you, Costis, you idiot. I’m trying to bury it, remember? Hide it from myself, hide it from the gods. Because not wanting the prize the gods have arranged for you—that just might offend the hell right out of them. If you are going to reject the gods’ rewards, Costis, you have to go very carefully.” He shook his finger in admonishment. “You can’t let them know that you hate being surrounded every minute of every day by people who think you should be acting like a king, and that you cannot possibly stand one more day listening to prating idiots tell you how lucky you are while a man you hate is laughing his guts out on the far side of the Black Straits, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about that because you are trapped in the only disaster you’ve ever gotten yourself into that you absolutely cannot get out of.” He turned and walked back along the parapet. He didn’t falter, but landed on the next crenellation in a stiff-legged jolt.

  He said over his shoulder, “Do you know, it’s the first time I’ve ever been caught in something I can’t get out of?” His laughter was bitter. “Because I don’t want out of it, Costis. I’m terrified that if they know how much I hate it, they might take it away.” He stopped then, as if realizing what he’d just said, all that he’d admitted out loud. “Oh, my god,” he said, “the wine isn’t working, is it?”

  He swung his body around and turned again toward Costis, but his momentum continued to carry him away. He took several teetering steps backward. Then his eyes widened, and Costis could see their whites in the dim light. Instead of recovering, he recoiled farther. One foot stepped out over the abyss. The king reached with his hand and caught at nothing and, though it was impossible, still hung there, suspended, over the open air.

  “My god,” the king whispered, not in prayer.

  And Costis heard, as clearly as he’d heard the king speaking, another voice. It said, “Go to bed.”

  Then the king was falling toward Costis, and Costis was tossing the wineskin aside in order to catch him. As his feet hit the walkway, the king’s knees buckled, and Costis held him, his own knees weak. He couldn’t tell which of them was shaking more. The king sucked at the air, drawing each breath and holding it. Costis remembered the doctor putting in his stitches, but these were more the hissing breaths of a man who has just cut himself or foolishly reached for a hot iron handle and burned his fingers. When the king finally straightened, Costis didn’t let him go and the king didn’t pull away. He stood, head down, with his hand on Costis’s shoulder, until the shaking finally subsided. He laughed a little then and shook his head.

  He pushed Costis away and stumbled off in the direction of his waiting attendants.

  Trying to believe that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen or heard what he’d heard, Costis followed, telling himself that it wasn’t true that he and the king and even the stone under their feet were nothing but tissue, transparently thin, and that for a moment, the only real thing in the universe had been there on the parapet with the king.

  “I am beginning to sense a certain amount of fraud in the reports of poets, Costis,” said the king, over his shoulder. His voice was almost steady. “Maybe someone lied to the poets. Maybe it’s just me. Do you know what the gods said to Ibykon on the night before his battle at Menara?” the king asked. “At least, what they said according to Archilochus?”

  “Something about courage,” Costis said automatically, busy with his own thoughts, busy trying not to think them. Gods belonged in temples and distant mountaintops, or floating on clouds. His every feeling revolted at the idea of hearing one speak.

  The king quoted:

  Rise and slay. Throw your chest against your enemy.

  Stand like an arrow when the enemy’s spear thuds at your feet.

  “And for Roma…,” the king quoted again.

  To you alone, Eldest,

  the Fates have given unassailable rule.

  Time alters all things,

  except this one thing.

  For you alone,

  the wind that bellows the sails of rule

  makes no shift.

  “That was Melinno.”

  “I know that,” said Costis. “My tutor once made me memorize the entire lyric.”

  “No ‘Glory shall be your reward’ for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, ‘Stop whining’ and ‘Go to bed.’” He snorted. “I should know better. Never call on them, Costis, if you don’t really want them to appear.”

  They had reached the knot of attendants and Aristogiton anxiously waiting for them.

  “I believe I will go to bed now,” the king very stiffly informed his attendants, as if daring them to comment, which they didn’t. He started down the stairs, his hand still on Costis’s shoulder, pushing him along slightly and leaning on him for balance. He seemed suddenly very tired, but he moved without hesitation from the wider main hall through this wing of the palace into the narrower passages on the way back to the royal apartments. His attendants and his guard trailed behind.

  They reached a staircase around a light well. The king turned up the stairs. One attendant raised a hand in a moment’s silent protest, but dropped it again. They followed up the stairs to a passage that looked somehow familiar to Costis, though he didn’t fully recognize it until they reached a tiny office and passed through it to a balcony looking out on a larger atrium. They had been here before.

  “Dammit,” the king said, looking out over the atrium.

  The attendants shuffled their feet. They weren’t gloating. They didn’t even want to remember that they had ever gloated in the past.

  “Well, this time I am not walking around,” the king said in disgust. “You can go the long way.” He assumed an expression of long suffering. “Obedient to my god, I am going directly to bed.” He sat down on the railing and swung both legs over at once, dropping down onto the rafter below before the attendants could stop him. To Costis, who’d reached for him too late, he said, “Worried?”

  “Your Majesty, you just—” Costis stopped.

  “Just what?” the king prompted wickedly.

  Nothing would induce Costis to say out loud that the king had almost fallen from the palace wall and that Costis had seen him manifestly saved by the God of Thieves.

  The king smiled. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Your Majesty, you are drunk,” Costis pleaded.

  “I am. What’s your excuse?” For hearing gods and seeing impossibilities.

  The king relented. “Safety is an illusion, Costis. A Thief might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when the god will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a staircase three steps up, I am in my god’s hands. He will keep me safe, or he will not, here or on the stairs.”

  The attendants did fruitlessly throw themselves at the railing, but he was out of their reach. Ignoring them, he continued on along the rafter, leaning gracefully to step around the trusses where they dropped from the roof in diagonals to join the rafter.

  “He’s a lunatic,” someone muttered. “A raving lunatic.”

  Costis wasn’t sure. He knew what he’d heard on the rooftop, even if he didn’t believe it. Even if he woke the next day believing it had all been a dream. The next day, he thought, when he would no longer be a member of the Guard.

  “Your Majesty,” Costis said again, more loudly than the attendants. The king turned, swaying just a little. He put his hand to the truss slanting down beside him.

  “Yes?”

  “You said you owed me something better than death by falling roof tile.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask for something?”

  The king appeared to think. “You can ask,” he said. “I’m king, Costis, not a genie. I don’t grant wishes.”

  “Come to sword training with the Guard in the morning.”

  The king peered at him as if he were having difficulty seeing. “Cos
tis? Do you have any idea what my head is going to feel like in the morning?”

  “You said that you would speak to Teleus tomorrow. Will you come?”

  “Why?” asked the king, suspicious.

  “Your side has healed. You need the exercise.” When the king continued to look dubious, he added, “Because I am asking.”

  “All right,” the king said at last. “All right, I will be there. Yech,” he muttered as he moved away.

  Costis and the attendants watched, hearts in their mouths, as he crossed the atrium. No one moved or spoke until he reached the far side and pulled himself up onto the balcony there. Costis swung then, to face the attendants.

  “That is my price,” he said. “You get him to sword training in the morning.”

  “Do you know what he’s going to be like in the morning?” one asked.

  “Costis…we can’t just…”

  “You can,” he insisted. “I’ve seen you badger him. Every one of you.”

  “That was before.”

  “Then you’ll just have to pretend nothing has changed. Get him to sword practice in the morning.”

  They wavered.

  “When I said, name your price, I was thinking of silver,” Hilarion admitted.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “All right,” he capitulated, “if that is your price, but you are obviously a lunatic, too.”

  They turned back through the doorway and made their way to the staircase. Costis stopped on a landing one flight down and watched the attendants and the squad of guards continue. He went back to his room, getting slightly lost on the way.

  In the morning, he was up and dressed early. He went down to the mess hall, which was empty, and fetched himself a piece of a loaf from the day’s baking. He was one of the first men on the training ground. The other guards stretched and chatted with one another. They ignored him. He paced, and tried not to look anxious. If the king didn’t come, he would have to face the awkwardness of training alone. He’d already discovered that no one would spar with him. Having shown up this morning, he knew his pride wouldn’t let him leave without some semblance of practice. He prayed the king would come.