A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Our jobs changed for the winter season. We worked on indoor tasks more often, repairing tools, patching clothes, fetching in loads of wood for the household. Helius spent hours carefully carving spoons. There were many days we were out in the cold rain, shaping the land and directing the flow of the water as it drained off. There were dams to be repaired, and ditches dug. We came in cold and wet and huddled around braziers set in a row down the middle of the room. The eaves of the building were open at either end, and the smoke rose to the ceiling and blew out downwind. It was warmer inside than out, but never warm enough. The baron provided blankets, which we wrapped around ourselves. Some of the men pushed their pallets together and slept under shared coverings, but I was not so close to any of the men to feel comfortable joining them. There was jockeying to be closest to the braziers. Ochto allowed no one to force anyone else out. Still, there was a pecking order, and I was near the top, for my man-killer reputation or maybe for the high value my workmates placed on my poetry repertoire.

  I was hungry all the time, I longed for a hot bath, and still, I wouldn’t have changed my situation for the world. I loved the evenings and the storytelling, even the idle talk among the men. Better the honest and companionable chatter than all the patronoi of my uncle’s court.

  As a slave I thought I had a better understanding of why those in the villa had turned on me but found I was not entirely correct. Some of the slaves around me would have been happy to fight for their baron. Others weren’t so sure. Their willingness to fight was dependent on the certainty of winning, and they wouldn’t take on a losing battle for their lord.

  “I’m his slave, not his liegeman,” said Pundis. “He bought me at market when I couldn’t pay my gambling debts. He can sell me just the same. My body is for sale, not my loyalty. I owe him nothing.”

  “But you belong to your baron,” I said. “Surely that means there is something more between the two of you. If you were crippled tomorrow in an accident in his fields, would your baron throw you out in the street to starve? I think not. Not unless he wants to be shamed in front of the patronoi.”

  I knew that there was at least one blind slave in the kitchens and any number of older slaves around the household who didn’t do enough work to justify their keep, but they were kept nonetheless. Hanaktos may have rebelled against his king, but he was a man who honored his obligations to his people.

  “Of course there are good masters and bad ones,” I said. “There are some that would chuck their slaves out to starve at the end of their lives, and I say, don’t fight for them. But even as a slave you are part of your baron’s household. It is his responsibility to support you.” I lifted a fold of the warm wool blanket I was wrapped in, provided by the baron we worked for. “And yours to support him,” I said.

  Luca, at the end of my row, laughed harshly, and we turned as one to look at him. “You talk,” he said. “It’s talk, and that’s the all of it.”

  I shrugged, and Luca laughed again. “You keep saying ‘your baron,’ Man-killer. Isn’t he yours as well? Are you going to rush up the hill to save him, or do you just expect us to?” The other men saw me struck back and laughed. My face reddened. I had no desire at all to defend their baron from any passing murderers, and they could tell. I asked myself whom I would fight for, with the people I loved most already dead.

  “I’d save Berrone,” I muttered, thinking that she’d been kind to me, that she held my debt, even if she was too stupid to know it.

  “Oh,” said Luca, taking my words in an unintended fashion. “I’d save Berrone, too,” and they all laughed. The conversation continued on in a different direction, and I fell silent.

  I thought of the servants in the villa at Letnos. Free and slave, they had turned on me. They could have chosen to fight, and they hadn’t, probably because they judged it a losing battle, and I couldn’t blame them for that. They had seen me in desultory practice with a sword or reading poetry. They’d seen me whimpering after my tutor switched my hands. It was no wonder they thought they would be asking for their own deaths by following me. So they had made their choices and died of it anyway.

  I don’t know if we would have won the fight in the villa if they had stood with me. I know that it was my fault that they didn’t try. My entire life I had been no better than Hyacinth, who chose to betray me and then stood wringing his hands at the consequences. All my life I had been aggrieved to be the prince of Sounis, wailing, “Why me? Why me?” and looking for some way to deny my responsibilities.

  Of course the servants had chosen not to follow me; I’d failed them already by refusing to be a man they could believe in. I was, in that sense, as responsible for their deaths as I was for my mother’s and sisters’. I was sorry that I hadn’t done better for them and glad that I would not fail anyone else.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN one of my dreams, my tutor told me a story, and I would like to tell it to you. I don’t know why I was dreaming of it, but it has come to my mind often in recent days. It is the story of Morpos’s choice.

  There once was a young man named Morpos who lived in a small village at the edge of a great forest and was known to all his neighbors as a fine pipe player. The nearby forest was filled with bandits, and hidden in the middle of it was a temple belonging to Atrape, goddess of wise decisions. The temple was guarded by a wolf, and stories told of an opisthodomos filled with treasures. Any one of those treasures—a bag of gold, a necklace of rubies, an enchanted shield or sword—the goddess would give to any who got past the wolf at the door.

  Few people took up the offer. Not only was there the wolf to consider, but also the bandits who would catch those who survived a visit to the temple and strip them of anything of value. And those who didn’t have gifts of value were stripped of their lives. One wise supplicant had survived to ask the goddess for the gift of prophecy and been given it, only to be captured immediately thereafter. He shouted, “I am going to die, I am going to die,” and he did.

  Another man asked for a magical sword. He left the temple and became king of the bandits for a time, until he was stabbed in his sleep. The sword rusted away soon after.

  One night, as he was sleeping, the young man in our story dreamed of the wolf. In his dream, the wolf revealed that he had once been a king who had offended the gods and been transformed into a beast. He had been sent to guard the temple but was forbidden to attack anyone who came in peace. All that was necessary to enter the temple was to bow to the wolf and offer your throat.

  The young man had no desire to go to the temple and gave little thought to his dream. His own wish was to travel far from the forest, to see the world and play his pipes. In the night the wolf came to him again. And again. Finally, late one winter afternoon, the young man was walking at the edge of the forest when rain began to fall. He moved under the trees for shelter but continued to get wet. He moved deeper into the woods, and the rain came down more and more heavily. Ahead he saw a small hut made from branches left by a woodcutter. He ducked through the low opening on one side and came face to face with the largest wolf he had ever seen in his life. It was as high as his chest, with teeth like awls in a row, and there was no hope of escape. Remembering his dream, he offered the wolf his throat. Perhaps if the animal was not hungry, the two might share the shelter awhile.

  He was much astonished when he heard the wolf say, “Your grandfather’s brother was welcome here once.”

  Lifting his head, the young man looked around and found himself in a temple with marble floors and pillars and a roof high overhead, not the crossing branches of the hut he had seen from the outside.

  “He asked for a sword,” said the wolf over his shoulder as he padded away toward the fire in front of the altar.

  The young man looked out the open doors of the temple at the rain.

  “The bandits will expect you to have gold, and will kill you if you don’t,” the wolf said. “Though, if you have offended the goddess by leaving without her gift, your problems with t
he bandits will be inconsequential.”

  Sighing, the young man moved to the fire. He could at least be warm and dry. He found a tray of food waiting and made himself at home. The wolf was surprisingly good company, telling stories of the people who had come to the temple in the past. Some had taken the gold, hoping to sneak past the bandits. Some had taken weapons and then spent the rest of their lives fighting. The young man played his pipes for the wolf and eventually lay down to sleep as the rain fell outside. In the morning the goddess appeared to ask him what gift from the temple he would choose.

  “Does anyone who takes the gold get to keep it?” he asked. “Does everyone who takes the sword end up a bandit?”

  The goddess smiled. “Everyone thinks he will be the exception.”

  Morpos asked if he could have another day to think about it.

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” said the goddess, “you must choose.”

  The young man talked things over with the wolf all day and slept well that night. In the morning, when the goddess came and asked if he had made a decision, he said he had.

  “Goddess, I must choose a gift from your temple.”

  “There is no must,” said the goddess. “I offer you a gift of your choice, and you may choose to decline.”

  Morpos knew it was a foolish man who declined the gifts of the gods.

  Morpos said, “Then I will take the wolf, if you please.”

  The goddess smiled. She said, “You may take him with my goodwill, but once he leaves the temple he will not be under my power or yours. He may eat you.”

  “He may, but he may not. I cannot like my other choices, and indeed, I believe he will not.”

  The goddess freed the wolf, and he did not eat Morpos. They walked together out of the forest, the wolf warning the bandits away with a wolfish grin and Morpos playing his pipes.

  In my dreams, I tasked my tutor. These stories always seem to me to have more holes in them than story. Why did the temple look like a hut on the outside? Did the goddess mean to trick Morpos? Wasn’t the temple supposed to be in the middle of a forest? Surely the young man would have noticed if he’d gone that far. Why was the goddess giving away gifts anyway? And why would someone who took a sword or a spear necessarily become a bandit? Obviously it was so some lesson could be taught, but I found it frustrating.

  I said, “Why didn’t Morpos ask the goddess to turn him into a mouse or a wren so he could escape the bandits that way?”

  “Maybe he was afraid she wouldn’t turn him back.”

  The clear light of the library was slanting in through the glass-paneled doorway to my right, falling on the table between my tutor and me and on dust motes hung in the air. The tiny flecks drew my eye, and I watched as they dipped and swirled in invisible currents.

  “They are beautiful in the light, are they not?” my tutor asked. They were, catching the sun and shining like tiny stars themselves.

  “You know, there are just as many outside the sun’s rays that are invisible,” she said. Then, in the way of dreams, she lifted her hand into the air and moved a single dust mote into the light. “And you?” she asked. She lifted her hand again, just beyond the edge of the light, and I knew she held another mote and could move it as easily into the way of the sun, and I said, “No, thank you. I am content where I am.”

  A few days later I was beaten. It was entirely my own fault. I forgot that my standing in the barracks was not universal in reach.

  There were twenty-two of us in the barracks, ranging from fourteen through fifty or so in years. I had as much freedom as any of the men. With permission, we walked down to the shore in our free time if the day was sunny or lounged in the courtyard. On very rare occasions the men of the megaron might go into town for a festival, but that was only once or twice a year, and it had not happened in my time there. Those with friends in the megaron itself could wander up the slope, across the stable yard to the terrace, and from there into the scullery and the kitchens. None of the field hands went farther than that.

  I had been up to the kitchens a number of times with a man named Dirnes and Oreus, the one who’d named me Bunny. At the end of the day after my dream of the dust motes, as the last light was just gone, we were walking up past the stables, intending to cross the yard to the entryway into the lower levels of the megaron. Dirnes was friends with one of the lesser cooks, a baker, and he had hopes of coming by a soft roll or two.

  As we rounded the corner of the stables, Dirnes rammed into someone coming the other way. It was a direct collision; neither had the time to turn aside, and the other man was knocked backward. Clutching at Dirnes, he fell, taking Dirnes with him to the ground and swearing a blue streak. Dirnes popped up, apologies on his lips, but the other man, a soldier and a drunken one, was having none of it. Still sprawled on the ground, he struck Dirnes, who was bending over him, hard in the mouth.

  Instead of falling back, Dirnes stayed for another blow and went on trying to help the man up. Angry, I pulled Dirnes aside and seized the soldier by the shoulders. Using both hands, I heaved him to his feet. Standing, we were eye to eye, and his belligerence was impaired by the close look into my face.

  “Better now?” I asked, and he nodded warily.

  I turned him toward his friend and pushed him, not too gently, on his way. He gave me an evil look over his shoulder but didn’t come back, heading on unsteadily toward the entrance of the megaron instead. Dirnes and Oreus, I realized, had left me and gone back down the path toward the field house.

  When I caught up to them, I found to my consternation that Dirnes was angry, and angry with me.

  “What did you think you were doing?” he snarled.

  “He was drunk. There was no point in letting him hit you.”

  “Just hope nothing more comes of it,” Oreus advised Dirnes, nudging him on toward the barracks. Unsure of my ground, I held my peace.

  In the morning, just after the call to rise, as we all were climbing stiffly to our feet and stretching our muscles to face the day’s work, there was a disturbance at one of the shed doors. It was the soldier of the night before and another man, his officer, I supposed. They came to complain of an unruly slave. Any number of eyes flicked toward Dirnes, who was still sitting on his pallet. But I rose first, drawing the eye of the soldier.

  “Him!” he said. Dirnes had knocked him down, and no doubt the soldier would have settled for exercising his revenge there. He may not even have realized, until I stood, that I was also a slave, but he knew that I was the one who had embarrassed him.

  With no other choice in the face of a complaint from a free man, Ochto walked me out to the punishment post and tied my hands to the ring there. When he was finished, my knees no longer held me. I don’t know who untied me, but they carried me back to my pallet and left me there while they went off to work.

  At the midday break I could get myself to my feet. No one got between me and the first place in line. I had to eat on my knees, the bowl on the ground. Then I lay down again, praying that Ochto wouldn’t expect me to work in the fields after the break.

  He didn’t, and I slept on and off through the end of the day. It was interesting. My back was certainly sore, more damage done there than Basrus had done when he was disguising me as an unruly slave, but it was damage to the skin, nothing much deeper. The pain, no matter how sharp, was not as distressing as the aftermath of Basrus’s beating, perhaps because it wasn’t my head that hurt, or because I was not so shattered by other events as I had been then.

  I felt no particular distress, but a little surprise.

  When we were adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift, I had watched the magus beat Eugenides. We’d thought he was no more than a common thief from Sounis’s gutters, and had listened to him whine and complain for days. When food was missing, it was easy to blame him. The magus used a riding crop on his back, and holy sacrificial lambs, Gen had come up off the ground like he’d been catapulted. It was as if he was a different person, some stranger who’d manifested
in Gen’s body. He’d dumped Pol flat onto his back—something I never thought I’d see—and gone for the magus. If Pol hadn’t been up again so quickly, the magus was ready to run and dignity be damned. Even with Pol between him and Gen, the magus had been wary.

  I thought later that this was the real Gen revealed, the person who’d been hiding behind a screen of complaints and needling humor. But I spent whole days with Eugenides after our adventures, and that Eugenides was exactly the Gen I had traveled with. Maybe I don’t know which Gen is real. But I know there was nothing feigned about his emotions after he had been beaten.

  Where, I wondered, was my wounded pride? Where was my outrage? My self-respect? Nowhere, it seemed. My back hurt. I lay there on my pallet, hoping it would improve soon and wondering, in a distant, unreproachful sort of way, if I was any kind of man at all, and decided that I probably wasn’t.

  I got up the next day. Very sore but well able to move a shovel. Though reduced to half a shovel again at a try, I was no more pathetic than I had been when I first arrived in Hanaktos’s fields, and Ochto didn’t seem inclined to push me. I worked alone. Dirnes wasn’t speaking to me. He cast me bitter looks in the barracks and turned a disdainful shoulder on me if he caught me looking in his direction.

  There was nothing I could do about it, so I worked. Ochto was watching me carefully, and I didn’t want to give him the idea that I might be contemplating anything in line with my man-killer reputation. The sweat in my stripes stung, and I was looking forward to rinsing it away with fresh well water once we were back at the barracks. I certainly didn’t want to find myself chained again to the ring in the wall by my pallet.