A Conspiracy of Kings (8 page)

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.

Alas, when we reached the barracks, I discovered an
unanticipated difficulty. Ochto had pulled my shirt off before
using the cane on my back. In the morning, moving very carefully,
I’d managed to get it on. Now I didn’t think I could
get it off. Not only was it much too painful to lift my arms over
my head, but the stupid thing had gotten stuck to me in places. I
was at a standstill, staring wistfully at the well, and noticed
that several of the other men were looking daggers at Dirnes.

Reluctantly, he came to help, but he was still angry, and his
ministrations were not gentle. He pulled on my shirt, and I swore
at him. He was more careful then, but his scowl was no less black.
I cared little for that once he was tipping the bucket at my neck.
It felt divine. He patted me dry with my own shirt, then handed it
to me and walked away without a word. I shrugged cautiously and
went to lie down for an afternoon rest.

That night he appeared, to my utter amazement, with an iced
cake. He could only have gotten it from his friend the cook, and
the cook could only have provided it at some significant risk. Yet
Dirnes was still clearly angry with me, and I couldn’t think
why he was asking for favors on my behalf.

“Dirnes,” I said, “I don’t want your
cake.”

I did, actually. I wanted it a lot.

The men in the barracks were watching us.

“I didn’t ask you to do me any favors!” Dirnes
said, very nearly shouting, not just angry, upset. His distress
touched me when his anger hadn’t, and I suddenly understood
what I had failed to see before: that Dirnes was a slave, like me.
He had nothing, or anyway, very, very little. I had saved him a
beating from the soldier and taken a beating from Ochto that might
have been his. He couldn’t pay me back. An iced cake, a
trivial thing, had no doubt cost him all his credit and more with
the cook, and he was still obliged to me, would be obliged until he
could somehow sacrifice to do a favor in return, with no end for
that obligation in sight. This was a principle of indenture of
which I had been unaware. Slaves don’t do favors for other
slaves.

“Dirnes, I am sorry,” I said, reaching out to grab
his hand and squeezing it hard. “It was nothing,
really.” I lifted my arm to show him how much more easily it
moved. “By rest day it will be healed. Ochto won’t even
have left marks.”

Dirnes stared at me as if I’d said I was going to grow a
pair of wings and fly up to visit the gods. I was uncomfortably
aware that everyone else was staring at me, too. Ochto in
particular. Hastily I broke the iced cake in half.

“Here, share with me,” I said.

My previous life just seemed to slip away. My dreams of the
library grew more rare and less vivid. I was more cautious passing
soldiers. I knew my place. I enjoyed an occasional tidbit from the
kitchen, shared in friendship with Dirnes, and hardly thought about
the dinners at the Sounis megaron that lasted until dawn. My uncle
was losing more ground, but I was less and less interested in the
news of the outside world. Dirnes’s pursuit of the
cook’s goodwill was more important to day-to-day life. Our
progress in terracing the baron’s landscape and digging the
ditches to carry the runoff of the heavy winter rains was what
mattered, not battles that took place miles away. When my
uncle’s army was defeated at Thylos, it hardly seemed to have
anything to do with me.

As the rains lessened and the days grew warmer again, I was
promoted to wall building and found I had a gift for it. Something
about the careful choosing and positioning of stones, something
about the way something so durable grew out of an accumulation of
small decisions, filled me with satisfaction.

On a day hotter than usual for so early in the year, we had been
working on the landward side of a low hill, cut off from the sea
breeze. Dirnes had asked for permission to go down to the shore for
a quick swim before returning to the barracks to eat. It
wasn’t unusual for the men to take a quick break in the
middle of the day, and Ochto had agreed, so four of us had hurried
down to the shore. We’d stayed overlong and were hurrying
back, busily undoing all the good of our swim, but unwilling to
risk missing our meal entirely. There were plenty of men ready to
eat whatever was left in the pot if Ochto thought we were away too
long. We were on the road when we heard horsemen behind us and
moved off to avoid the dust they would kick into the air. I looked
up as they passed and saw my father.

H
E was mounted on a bay horse, surrounded by ten or
fifteen of his men. I stood stock-still and watched them go by. My
father never looked anywhere but ahead.

“Bunny?” Dirnes asked.

I shook myself. “Nothing,” I said. “A former
master of mine.”

“Good one?” he asked.

I shrugged.

Hanaktos was an enemy of the king. Was my father perhaps
changing sides? That was a laughable idea; my father is the
opposite of changeable. It was far more likely that my uncle had
sent my father under a flag of truce to woo Hanaktos back to his
side.

I was thoughtful as we continued back to the field house. Should
I have called out to my father? I was a failure as a man, a prince,
and a son, and I doubted very much that he would care that I was
still alive.

Ochto was waiting for us, and there was little I could do but
eat my meal and sit on my pallet with my back against the plastered
wall while the other men lay down to rest. Was I of any use to my
father at all? Would it make any difference to anyone but me if I
stayed right where I was?