A Conspiracy of Kings (6 page)

“Not used to that, are you?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Better this than a galley, though, right?” He
watched me through narrowed eyes as he spoke, and continued to
observe me even after I nodded my agreement. He popped the lock off
as the potboy brought breakfast. My whole body protesting, I was
still first in line for the food.

I dragged myself through the next days, working, resting in the
afternoon, digging until the light was going from the sky. I ate
and then slept dreamlessly. Slowly I grew stronger and was awake
longer. During rest periods I watched the other men as they
wandered in and out of the barracks. I began to wait with them when
we came in from the fields for my turn to rinse myself at the
wellhead instead of going directly to my pallet of blankets in
anticipation of my next meal. I was still first in line to eat.

Every night the men entertained themselves under the
overseer’s watchful eye. They talked until by mutual consent
someone’s offering of poetry or song was chosen, a different
man each night, in a subtle order of rotation I didn’t
understand. Some knew only one piece, others had a broader range,
and they were careful, in an unscripted way, not to overuse
anyone’s limited repertoire. One evening, as I lay on my
pallet, with my right hand chained to the ring in the wall, I heard
a man across the room reciting Eacheus’s speech from the
ending of the
Eponymiad
.

I hadn’t really listened before because I’d been
falling asleep as they started. I was falling asleep then, but a
mistake caught my ear: “laughing-eyed chorus” instead
of “doe-eyed Kora.”

Without lifting my head, I recited the line correctly, not
considering if anyone would hear or care what I said. There was an
uncomfortable silence before the speaker hesitantly started again,
and in the space of the next few lines, I was asleep. In the
morning, as I shoveled my meal out of my wooden bowl, I realized
that everyone was staring at the man on the next pallet and that he
was eyeing me. A chill settled in the muscles of my back. Then,
like someone tensing before a dive into cold water, the man beside
me said, “You know the
Eponymiad
?”

“Your pardon?”

“You were in-house? You know the poets?”

I shrugged. “Some,” I said, not sure where this was
headed. Nowhere, it seemed, as everyone went back to his food and
then trailed off to the fields. They talked among themselves about
me, I could tell. I wondered if I’d revealed some weakness,
lost the protection of my invisibility.

That evening the skin between my shoulders crawled as I received
my portion of food, and it took all my self-control not to hurry to
my bed to get my back against a wall. Eugenides wouldn’t
hurry, I reminded myself. I wouldn’t, either.

Later, when everyone was fed, there was a stirring at the far
end of the room. A scrawny boy, the youngest in the barracks, who
nonetheless could shift twice what I could per shovel, came
crouching down beside me and hesitantly offered me his bread from
the meal. “Did you hear anything of the choruses from the
plays this year?” he asked.

The baron’s food was sufficient, not generous, and I was
hungry, but the boy’s ribs showed, right up to his
collarbones, and I pushed his bread back at him. “I heard all
of them.”

I recited the opening of the history of the Mannae. Every man,
even the overseer, listened, rapt. Instead of being tired when I
was finished, I felt more awake than I had since I’d been
captured. Lo, the power of poetry, I suppose. So I gave them a
sketch of the plot and a few bits of the important speeches.
I’ve done recitations at wine parties and in front of tutors
and at the court when duty obliged. I’ve never had an
audience as gratifying. I could have talked all night, but after
I’d finished with the Mannae, the workers sighed happily and
lay down to sleep. I lay down as well but was awake in the quiet
dark for a few minutes more.

So I took my place in the rotation and settled into the company
of laborers. I rose with them in the morning and worked with them
all day, slowly coming to recognize them by name and to know the
jokes they shared, the friendships between them, and the
animosities. They were good men, and their friendships were common
and the animosities very small, in part because Ochto was a direct
and effective overseer and not reluctant to clout on the head a man
who was resting while others worked. Ochto had a cane to enforce
his judgment, but it hung on two pegs near the door to the barracks
and was rarely used. We worked with a sense of companionship and
common cause, and I looked forward to the evenings, when I joined
in the talk and listened to the recitations. I performed no more
often than anyone else. I was a treasure to be parceled out slowly,
and I savored the experience.

My uncle had made it to his allies in the northern part of
Sounis and was raising his armies against the rebels. We heard
little news at first, but that much we knew in the field house
because Hanaktos had sent soldiers to join Baron Comeneus. Why he
was the leader of this rebellion I couldn’t begin to guess. I
wouldn’t have expected him to be able to lead the more
fractious of my uncle’s barons out of a hole in the ground if
it was filling with water, especially after making a botch of the
assassination attempt.

The men in the barracks seemed to care very little and assumed
it would all be over soon, that the king would deal as summarily
with the rebels as he had in the past. I could not imagine what
good result the rebels thought could come from weakening the nation
when it was already in such peril, but it was the opinion of the
men I worked beside that none of it had anything to do with them.
By and large, I agreed with them.

By this time I had realized that not all the men around me were
slaves. Some were okloi tied to the baron’s family who worked
for room and board, and some were salary men, free to go at the end
of their contracts. They earned a pittance, paying most of their
wages back to cover the cost of their lodging, and would have been
better off tied to the baron and working for no wages at all. They
had no guarantee of more work or pay at the end of their contracts,
though in practice, I suppose, the baron was unlikely to let them
go. I knew that I hadn’t yet grasped all the details of the
pecking order, because one of the men much admired was a slave, and
Ochto himself was a former slave set in place over free men, who
worked very comfortably beneath him.

One day, after I had been in the field house for a few weeks, a
new worker joined us. The new man thought he should be first in
line for food. When he stepped in aggressively between me and the
potboy, my first reaction was surprise. Before I could register
anything but that he was both taller and heavier than I was, the
man behind him tugged urgently at his arm and hissed a warning
under his breath: “Man-killer.”

The new worker paused to reevaluate, but I didn’t. I
couldn’t afford to lose my reputation, and I certainly would
if there were a confrontation. I scooped up a wooden bowl and
collected my supper. Then I walked to my bed and sat, making a show
of careless bravado by crossing my legs and slumping as if I had
not a worry in the world. In other words, I gave my best imitation
of Eugenides. All I could do was hope the other men didn’t
see through the act.

The new man collected his own dinner and sat across the barracks
from me. I spooned my dinner into my mouth as quickly as I could to
hide the fact that my hands were shaking. Finally, I screwed my
courage to the sticking place and looked over at him to find him
staring warily back. I essayed a conciliatory smile. He hastily
dropped his eyes to his supper and didn’t look up again. I
glanced around at the other men, realizing that they, too, must be
wary of me to let me eat first every night. Wary of me. Not of my
father or the power of my uncle. Me.

I swallowed my laugh but couldn’t stop my smile.

The new worker’s name was Runeus. After the meal, as we
returned to work, he muttered a complaint about giving way to a
slave, but Helius, who was the undisputed second-in-command to
Ochto and also a slave, looked over his shoulder with a glance that
silenced him. I put everything I had into looking like someone who
has killed another man. Telling you this now, I realize that two
men were already dead at my hand, but somehow, I didn’t think
of them then. I was acting a part for the other men in the
barracks.

To my continuing but carefully hidden amazement, Runeus never
challenged me again. Instead, things continued much as before. Only
now I knew that my place in the food line was not a happy
coincidence but a marker of my place in the hierarchy of the field
hands.

The next rest day one of the men looked to me and then to the
overseer. “We thought to go to the shore. Man-killer, here,
can he come?” The men often went down to the water in their
free time or walked out to visit friends in other field houses or
to watch the dice games up on the terrace beside the megaron.

Ochto looked me over. I had been careful to offer no trouble,
and Ochto hadn’t bothered putting the bracelet and chain on
my wrist at night for many days.

Ochto nodded. Delighted, I jumped to my feet and followed the
other men away from the megaron. We took the road toward town and
then cut in the direction of the shore on a narrow path that led us
to a break in the rocks where we could climb down to the sand to
swim and then lie in the sun or the shade as each was inclined to
be warmer or cooler.

I was happy. As difficult as that must be for you to believe,
and in spite of the grief I still carried for my mother and my
sisters, I was happy. No one was angry at me, disappointed in me,
burdened by me. I had nothing to do but sit in the warm sand and
look at the sea.

Oreus, the man who’d provided my day at the shore, dropped
to the sand beside me. “So, man-killer,” he asked.
“Do you have a name?”

I thought before I answered. Wisdom is not a name for a slave.
Stone, Mark, Faithful, Strong are slave names. I had a nurse once
who had named her son Shovel. She was a foreigner, from somewhere
far north, and she told me that she liked the way it sounded.
She’d taught me a few words of her own language, but the only
one I could remember was Zec, and I couldn’t quite retrieve
the meaning, though it sat on the tip of my tongue.

“Zec,” I said, as if my tongue had decided to speak
for itself.

“That’s a Hurrish name.” Oreus looked
surprised. “You are from Hur?”

“No,” I said. “My mother heard it
once.”

“It means ‘rabbit,’” Oreus said.

I smiled. Rabbit was perfect.

“Tell me, Rabbit. Is that your happy face you make? I
can’t tell.”

I felt my upper lip and rubbed my thumb against the scar tissue.
I could feel it distorting my mouth. My nose had a new bump in the
middle of it as well. Maybe I looked more like a man-killer than
I’d realized.

“Zecush, we should call you,” said Oreus.
“Bunny.” He punched me lightly enough in the arm, and I
almost fell over. “Come for a swim.”

The other men seemed to think that a man-killer called after a
rabbit kit was a good joke. From then on they sometimes called me
Zec or Zecush, but more often just Bunny. That night I slept more
lightly than before and dreamed for the first time since my
capture. I dreamed of a library with books and scrolls in ranks on
shelves, all flooded with clear light. When I opened my eyes, the
shed around me was still dark. The call to rise hadn’t yet
come. I lay in the dim quiet of the predawn, listening to the
breath of the sleeping men around me and thinking of my dream.

I was still happy. It was no rest day. I faced a day in the hot
sun, shifting dirt and stones, with scant food and ignorant
company, and I’d never felt so much at peace. I laughed at
myself as I shifted on my pallet for a more comfortable spot and a
few minutes’ more rest. Let me be beaten, I thought, and then
see how well I liked being a slave. Too soon the overseer knocked
on the doorway with his stick, and we all rose, grumbling, for
another day.

I had grown more skilled at shifting dirt. If I couldn’t
compete with some of the men in the field with me, I could keep up
with most of them. I worked hard, I slept well at night, and I
dreamed often. I grieved, but a part of me felt a lightening of a
burden I had carried all my life: that I could never be worthy of
them, that I would always disappoint or fail them. As an unknown
slave in the fields of the baron, I knew the worst was over. I had
failed them. At least I could not do so again.

My dreams were lucent and vivid, as if the peacefulness of my
days had put spurs to my imagination, and I dreamed again and again
of the same place, the distant library with its endless collection
of books and scrolls.

In my first dream, I only wandered through the space in awe,
sensing that I was impossibly far from the ordinary world of
Hanaktos’s field hands. I was in an enormous room, filled
with light from windows high up on the walls near the white
coffered ceiling. On the wall that faced north, glass-paneled doors
opened onto a balcony that looked over a green valley far below.
Beyond the valley was a wall of snow-covered mountains with tops so
bright they hurt the eye, and behind them an even brighter blue sky
that never showed a single cloud.

Inside the room, opposite the glass doors, were carved wooden
ones that remained closed in all my visits. I had no idea what
might lie beyond them, probably because I had no interest.
Everything I desired was in the room with me. Between these doors,
and on every other space of wall, were shelves for books and
scrolls and packets of papers and every kind of writing you can
imagine, even tablets impressed with minute scratches that I not
only knew were writing but could read, by the magic of dreams.