He rose to leave and was halfway to the door when Eugenides asked, “Does the wardrobe suit?”
Sounis turned back. Eugenides was looking into his wine cup, and Sounis wasn’t sure how to answer. Had he failed to thank the king appropriately? Was he supposed to admire the gifts more? He knew that Eugenides paid a great deal of attention to such things, but to Sounis they were just clothes. “The pockets are sewn on the inside,” he said. He couldn’t imagine why someone would want to keep something in a pocket he couldn’t easily reach, and these were particularly useless, too deep and too narrow to get his hand into.
Eugenides shrugged one shoulder. “I sometimes find them useful,” he said into his wine cup.
“Well,” said Sounis, “perhaps I will, too. Thank you.”
“Be blessed in your endeavors,” said Eugenides, using the universal Eddisian phrase for please and thank you and you’re welcome.
“And you,” said Sounis, aping his formality.
When the king of Sounis was gone, Eugenides’s attendants, waiting in the guardroom, heard the wine cup smash.
Philologos stood, saying wearily, “I’ll clean it up,” and went to fetch a cloth.
It was a gloomy Sounis that made his way from the private apartments of the king of Attolia to his own suite. He followed his borrowed attendant, paying little attention to his surroundings, until Ion suddenly slowed and Sounis nearly ran into the back of him. In an apparent coincidence, no doubt meticulously prearranged by the Mede ambassador, Melheret and his retinue were just climbing the stairs as Sounis arrived at the head of them. It would be impolite not to draw back and leave the landing free for those ascending.
“Your Majesty,” said the ambassador, pausing to bow where he stood with one foot on a higher step and his hands bunching the fabric of his flowing trousers, lifting them as a woman lifts the hem of a dress. If it was an oddly delicate greeting, it was also blatantly self-assured. The Mede ambassador had no concerns about being taken at a disadvantage and made that much clear.
“Ambassador Melheret.” Sounis returned the address, bowing politely back.
Melheret continued up the remaining steps to the landing, brushed the wrinkles from his clothes, and bowed again. He was as tall as Sounis, but more slender, with gray in his beard and in the hair at his temples. His narrow face was weathered by time in the sun, and he had probably been a soldier before he became an ambassador. He gave the appearance of good health and radiated a confidence that Sounis envied.
“A god-sent opportunity that we meet, Your Majesty,” Melheret said. “I was just returning to my rooms, in anticipation of a bottle of remchik, which my secretary informs me has arrived. Perhaps you would care to join me?”
Sounis looked to Ion, who bowed to indicate his willingness to wait for as long as the king of Sounis desired. Sounis cursed inwardly, certain this meeting had been arranged for a moment when he was without the magus to act as a mediator. There was no polite way to refuse.
The Mede’s apartments were as luxurious as Sounis’s, but the Mede seemed to have been unimpressed by them. In the reception room, where Sounis waited for his host to reappear, cloth tapestries hung from hooks that had been hammered into the plaster walls with no care taken for the decorations already painted there, and Sounis wondered if it was an attempt to obscure spy holes. If so, he doubted it would be successful.
The Attolian furniture was pushed into the corners, and several replacement pieces of Medean design, small enough to have been shipped with the ambassador, had been put in their place. Mede statuettes of gods or goddesses or, Sounis supposed, fertility figures were scattered around the room, clashing with the rest of the Attolian background. The combined effect made Sounis wince.
The Mede ambassador returned carrying a ceramic bottle and two beautiful wine cups. They were glass, a deep blue in color, decorated on the outsides with bas-relief dancers carved in white. Sounis, taking his cup, admired it, running a finger across the raised figures.
“They are lovely, are they not?” said the Mede. “They come from a workshop in our capital. The artist has made a glass service for the emperor himself.”
Holding the cup up to the light from a nearby lamp, Sounis could see that the glass had two layers, white on the outside and blue on the inside. The effect was achieved by carving away the white layer, leaving only the images of white dancers on the blue background. He had never seen anything like it.
“Our artisans have worked for centuries to perfect their art,” said Melheret, as if no Sounisian artisans had ever done the same. “Some believe art is the greatest product of an enduring civilization.”
Following a wave of the Mede’s hand, Sounis chose a seat and sat in it gingerly. It was low to the ground, and the slanted seat tipped him against the curving back, making him wish he had pulled one of the more traditional chairs away from the wall. It wouldn’t be easy to get up in a hurry—say, if armed men leaped from behind the wall hangings.
“You need not fear being attacked, Your Majesty.”
Sounis suppressed a flinch before realizing that the Mede was not reading his thoughts about the furniture.
“Our nation is one of peace and great prosperity. We are not so poor of resources that we steal from our neighbors. Try the remchik?” Melheret had filled his glass.
Sounis took a drink, as he had seen the Mede do, tossing the contents of the glass cup into his mouth all at once. The liquid Melheret had poured was clear, so he knew it wasn’t wine, but he was still taken aback by the powerful alcohol. It went up his nose and seared his throat all the way down to the pit of his stomach. He tried to hold his breath but only succeeded in turning a cough into a whistle. When he inhaled, his breath burned as much as the alcohol had.
“Do you like it?” asked the Mede.
“It’s…delicious,” Sounis said politely. His eyes were watering.
“Have another.”
“How, then, do you explain your affiliations with my rebel barons?” Sounis thought of mentioning the attempt on his life as he had fled Sounis, but he assumed that the Mede would only deny any responsibility. If Melheret asked if he had seen Akretenesh with a match in his hand, Sounis would have to say no.
“We have no ‘affiliations,’ as you say,” said Melheret. “Our overtures to your barons, and to your father, have been no more than an honest attempt to establish communication with a new government, and what can be expected of any wise nation. Did we not send an ambassador to your father, thinking that he spoke for your uncle who was Sounis? No one would deny your right to return to your throne. And we, my brother ambassador Akretenesh and I, would be honored to act as neutral mediators. You do not need Attolia’s help to accomplish this.”
“And Attolia? Does she need to fear attack?”
“Again, no,” said the Mede, pouring once more.
Sounis was beginning to like the burning feeling in his middle, and after the second drink, he’d sensed a flavor in his mouth like mint and like fennel at the same time, something cool that contrasted with the heat. Still, he didn’t think it wise to have another taste, and he ignored the contents of the cup.
The Mede sat again and looked into Sounis’s eyes. “I will be frank with you. We are not well disposed toward Attolia. There are conventions among nations, relationships built on mutual good faith. She abused those relationships, lying about her intentions, inviting us to land our troops to aid in her defense, and then turning on them. More than that, she has cast us as aggressors, lying to you and to others in order to destroy our nation’s peaceful relations here on this small peninsula.”
The flavor that came after the burning flavor of the remchik wasn’t mint, Sounis decided on reflection, and realized that he’d absentmindedly sipped from his cup while Melheret was talking.
“Drink,” said the Mede. “Remchik is not for sipping, we say in my home. Its flavor comes in the swallow.” The older man spoke with an almost fatherly authority.
Sounis obediently drank, but
he declined another serving, holding the cup too close to allow Melheret to fill it without obvious effort.
Melheret said, “It is my task, given me by my emperor, to repair the battered ties between us and Attolia and encourage her to join a community of civilized nations.”
“Not prepare for an invasion?” asked Sounis. “I thought your emperor was gathering his armies and building the ships that would carry them to our ‘small’ peninsula. Did he not send Attolia a message to say so?”
Melheret’s head tilted, and his brow furrowed, as if Sounis’s words had been garbled or as if he’d said the carpet on the floor had come to life. “Excuse me?”
Sounis rubbed his face and pinched his numb lips, afraid that his words had been garbled. “Your emperor plans to invade with a huge army and has sent word of it to Attolia.”
Melheret shook his head. “Why, if he meant to invade, would he have warned Attolia of his plans?” Melheret put a companionable hand on Sounis’s knee and shook it. “Think, Your Majesty. She lies. That is the obvious explanation for every story she tells. Yes, my emperor sent home her spies; would any ruler not do the same? She was embarrassed at being caught in such perfidy and lies to cover her shame. Is this any ally for Sounis? See what she offers you in exchange for your humiliating surrender. A paltry few mercenaries, a handful of gold. My emperor is a far, far better ally if your barons continue to rebel, as indeed, they may not. They, too, perhaps were unaware that you yet lived and were their king. You do not need to invade your own home to secure it. It is my belief that your barons will return to you with open arms.”
“And if they don’t?” asked a skeptical Sounis.
“Then from my emperor you will receive gold and the armies to secure your throne. He will not demand oaths of loyalty.”
“Won’t he? What did he demand of Suninex?”
Again Melheret looked puzzled. “Do you mean Sheninesh? Sheninesh is our ally of many years and shares in our prosperity. They choose to accept our governance because they see it as a benefit, not as a yoke. You may have read accounts that say otherwise, but if they cannot even tell you the name of a country, how accurate can they be?”
Sounis remembered an old argument. “Eddis,” he said.
“Eddis? What about Eddis?”
“It isn’t pronounced that way.”
Melheret guided him back to the topic. “You count on the honesty and the support of your friend Eugenides, but it is she, not he, who rules Attolia. And is he in fact your friend? He does not seem so.”
“He is king,” Sounis said, holding on truculently to his friendship with Eugenides, spurred by the Mede’s skepticism to more conviction than he really felt.
“He is a thief, his wife, a murderess. I ask again, are these allies for Sounis?”
Sounis nodded agreeably and watched the room spin. He thought of a number of things that he could say, but decided that the wisest course would be to say nothing at all. “What is the flavor in the remchik?” he asked.
“It is made with sreet oil.”
“It’s very good. If you will excuse me.” He stood, nodded again to Melheret, and left. Ion waited for him outside Melheret’s rooms and silently led him away.
At his own door, Sounis said to the attendant, “I am sorry to keep you away from your king.”
“As you have noticed,” said Ion, “he will not have missed me. We are merely for ornamentation, like the king’s coats, his boots, and his embroidered sashes.”
Sounis said, “Gen’s very fond of his boots,” and then, when Ion smiled painfully, wished he hadn’t.
“Not even that, then,” Ion murmured as he opened the door to Sounis’s suite of rooms. “Verix is waiting for you and will attend you until morning.”
While Sounis accepted Verix’s help in getting undressed and crawled into bed to sleep off the remchik, the king of Attolia was visiting the queen in the royal apartments.
“He has had his meeting with the Mede,” he said moodily.
She answered, “You know I do not see the wisdom of pushing him into Melheret’s arms.”
“If I am taking his country, I’ll take it. I’m not going to charm it away.”
“You’re being a fool,” said Attolia. She was sitting on a low-backed chair as Aglaia removed the pins from her carefully braided hair. There was more she would have said, but she held her tongue. Not because Aglaia was there but because she doubted words would have had any effect.
“No one would argue with that,” said Eddis to the magus. She had invited him to her apartments while Sounis met with the king of Attolia. On the far side of the palace from the queen of Attolia, the magus had unwittingly echoed her opinion of Eugenides.
Eddis said, “If I bite my tongue anymore with the two of them, it will come off.”
“How embarrassing,” murmured the magus, and Eddis snorted indelicately.
“I’ve missed you since you left,” she said. “I am very glad you survived the return to Sounis. I don’t suppose Sophos’s uncle welcomed you with open arms.”
“He did not,” said the magus. “But I have always been useful to him. He assumed, as I did, that Sophos had died in the kidnapping attempt and that my loyalties would no longer be unfortunately divided.” He thought of the dead king, who had sweated his life away, leaving no one to regret his end. “I admit that my faith in his invitation was not perfect, but I am glad I accepted it. He was an astonishingly angry man, but he had many admirable qualities.” He glanced up at Eddis and said, “He could be quite charming.”
“Agape might have made something of him,” said Eddis. “I could not. Have you met Relius?”
“Oh, Relius and I know each other well.”
“I meant face to face,” said Eddis, and it was the magus’s turn to smile. Relius had been the queen of Attolia’s master of spies, and he and the magus had crossed paths in the past.
“You confuse me with Sounis’s baron Antimonus,” said the magus. “It was he who was the official spy master. Relius and I were not adversaries.”
“Oh,” said Eddis, and followed it with “hmm.”
“I have indeed been introduced to the former secretary of the archives,” said the magus repressively.
“What do you think?” asked Eddis.
“Damaged,” said the magus. “Attolia will not be able to use him again.”
“I think he is more valuable now as a friend to them both than as spy master, but I agree that the Medes won that round.”
“Let us hope they win no more,” said the magus, setting down his glass and rising. “I must return to my king.”
“One last thing,” said Eddis. “Eugenides asks you to bring Sophos to training in the morning. Gen has invited Melheret to spar.”
“Why didn’t Attolis ask Sounis himself?” asked the magus, then lifted his eyes to the heavens. “Never mind, I know why. Yes, I will bring my king in the morning.”
Sounis was fully dressed but not fully awake. The magus had roused him at dawn and explained the king’s invitation, but he was still rubbing his eyes, trying to rid himself of the vestiges of sleep and the remchik when he heard noises out in the reception room. He expected Verix and another attendant but found the king of Attolia and his entire retinue when he opened his chamber door.
Attolis engaged him with a wave and turned away. Sounis followed, the magus behind him, like obedient ducklings to the passageway outside the apartments. As he moved up beside Eugenides, Sounis said, “Chilly this morning.”
“Is it?” asked the king, and Sounis dropped the attempt at conversation.
The men walked in silence to the practice field, where they found a crowd of Attolians and Eddisians idly waiting. The captain of the Royal Guard crossed the open court to meet them. He was a prickly man, and Sounis sensed a nonspecific disapproval, for Eugenides, the training, the morning, the sun in the sky, Sounis wasn’t sure what. Gen nodded at him and, by the simple expedient of pointing at one man after another, arranged partners for warm-ups
and sparring.
The Mede made them wait. When Melheret arrived, he warmed up on his own, and when he was willing, he wandered across the open field to where Gen was practicing with a member of his guard. Wearing only his trousers and thin tunic, he appeared fit and comfortable with his sword.
When the king of Attolia and the Mede began to spar, both proceeded cautiously. Then the Mede started to press, and Eugenides responded, just barely keeping up. The Mede grew more confident and pressed harder. Suddenly Gen surged in with a rapid set of strokes that appeared momentarily overwhelming, but he was rebuffed. He fell back, and the sparring went on. Each time Gen escalated, the Mede was just that much better, that much faster, and Gen was again on the defensive.
Sounis stood beside the magus on the edge of the watching crowd and tried not to wince. Melheret was making only a minimal effort to keep a diplomatic face on the exchange, and it was clear that Gen was both angry and embarrassed.
This was not the easygoing, sarcastic friend he remembered, nor the emotionally distant king. This was a Gen oddly impotent in anger, and it was uncomfortable to watch him trying and failing to outlast the Mede. Sounis looked away. The Eddisians around him were watching with impassive intensity; the Attolians, with amused glances.
Midway through the match, Eugenides began using his hook to deflect thrusts from his opponent.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“Not at all,” said the Mede, but held out a hand and accepted a blunted dagger from someone in the crowd as his own second weapon. Gen continued to be overmatched.
Finally, when it was clear that Eugenides was never going to do the gracious thing and admit defeat, Melheret stepped back. “Your Majesty, I must beg you to excuse me,” he said. “I am afraid other duties call.” He bowed with mocking deference.
Gen thanked him, standing stiffly as Melheret left the practice field. Then he threw his practice sword on the ground so hard it bounced. Cursing, he picked it up, and after obviously considering hacking at the pavement with it, he pitched it across the open court. As he seemed still unsatisfied, Sounis offered his own practice sword, curious to see what would happen. It was a borrowed one, and he minded not at all when it went sailing between two of the Attolian guardsmen standing nearby.
A Conspiracy of Kings Page 13
