The Queen of Attolia (23 page)

“Constantly,” said Eddis. “He lies to himself. If Eugenides talked in his sleep, he’d lie then, too.”

Attolia looked stunned. “And you can’t tell?”

Eddis thought for a moment. “I sometimes believe his lies are the truth, but I have never mistaken his truth for a lie. If he needs me to believe him, he has his own way of showing his veracity.”

“Which is?”

“When he is being honest with you, you’ll know,” said Eddis, and nodded reassuringly to Attolia.

Attolia shook her head. “Let us face the truth. He is too young, and I am too old, and there is the not inconsequential fact that I cut off his hand. Try to tell me that this is not his revenge.”

Eddis stood up to face her and to look in her eyes. “He is not too young. You are not old. You only feel old because you have been unhappy for so long, and
this is not his revenge,
” she said.

“What kind of fool would I have to be to believe it was anything else?”

“I wouldn’t have allowed it,” Eddis told her.

“You wouldn’t have allowed it? Isn’t it your revenge, too?”

“Irene—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You were the princess Irene the first time we met.”

“It means ‘peace,’” Attolia said. “What name could be more inappropriate?”

“That I be named Helen?” Eddis suggested.

The hard lines in Attolia’s face eased, and she smiled. Eddis was a far cry from the woman whose beauty had started a war.

“Irene, I wouldn’t let Eugenides throw his life away on revenge no matter how he had been maimed.” Attolia looked away, but Eddis went on. “And if he says you are not a fiend from hell, I will accept his judgment.” Attolia slowly paced across the room. Eddis spoke again. “Irene? What choice do you have but to believe in him?”

“I might have to marry him,” Attolia said in a low voice. “I don’t have to believe anything.”

“Yes, you do,” said Eddis. “If you are going to marry him, you have to believe him. He isn’t a possession. He isn’t mine to keep or to give away. He has free choice, and he has chosen you. You must choose now. Between the two of us we can reach a treaty without a wedding. You don’t have to marry him, but if you choose to marry him, you have to believe him.”

Attolia turned, and Eddis thought that behind her mask the queen might be afraid, and so she finished lightly. “You have to believe him, because he’s going to have your entire palace up in arms and your court in chaos and every member of it from the barons to the boot cleaners coming to you for his blood, and you are going to have to deal with it.”

Attolia smiled. “You make him sound like more trouble than he is worth.”

“No,” said Eddis thoughtfully. “Never more than he is worth.”

Attolia ceded Ephrata. When she learned that the proceeds of the ten seized Attolian trade caravans had gone to Eugenides, she tabled her demands to have the monies restored to her treasury. Despite the basilisk stares of Eddis’s minister of war, a military accord was reached in a matter of days. The arrangements for a wedding finally began. And then halted when the queen of Attolia balked at the matter of consecrating an altar to Hephestia for the ceremony.

When pressed on the point, she uncharacteristically fled. Dropping the pen she held, she said, “There will be no altar to Hephestia in Attolia,” and stalked from the room. Eddis and Eugenides, the ministers and aides, both Eddisian and Attolian, were left looking at one another in surprise and consternation.

Eddis excused herself, and summoning Eugenides with a wave of her hand, she followed the Attolian queen. Once in the corridor Eddis stopped.

“The throne room,” Eugenides suggested.

They found her there. The empty room echoed their footsteps as they crossed the smooth marble floors. Eddis couldn’t help craning her head to look around as she did each time she saw the room. Attolia’s throne room was blue and white and gold instead of the more somber red and black and gold of Eddis’s. The mosaics
on the floor, the high ceilings with windows at the tops of the walls to flood the room with light, made it a more beautiful room even than the newer throne room and banquet hall in Eddis. Attolia didn’t need to eat in her throne room; she had other, even larger rooms for dining and dancing. Glancing at Eugenides, Eddis thought he walked through the room as if it were so familiar as to be unworthy of his attention. Perhaps it was. Attolia ignored them until they were standing in front of her.

“There will be no altar consecrated to Hephestia,” she said.

Eugenides continued up the steps to the dais and took her hand. “It is a token to the gods I believe in, no more.”

“No,” said Attolia.

“Because you do not believe?”

“Oh, no,” said Attolia bitterly. “Because I believe and I do not choose to worship. I will have no altar dedicated to her and no sacrifice made.”

“I made a vow,” Eugenides said, “promising this if I became king—”

“No,” said Attolia.

“Why?” shouted Eugenides.

Pale with fury, Attolia pulled her hand away from Eugenides and clenched her fists. “How did I catch you when you hid in my palace? How did I know you moved through the tunnels for the hypocaust? How did
I know how you entered the town and how you would escape?
How did I know?
” she shouted.

Eugenides had grown pale as well. “I made a mistake,” he said.

“You made a mistake,” Attolia agreed. “You trusted your gods. That was your mistake. Moira,” Attolia said, spitting out the name. “Moira, the messenger of your Great Goddess, came and told me where you would be and that if I would have my men nail boards between the trees above the curve in the river after dark that day, then I would catch you there. She came back later to warn me not to offend the gods. Moira,” she said again, “in the guise of one of my attendants, told the Mede where to find you in the mountains. How
else
could he have found you there at the Pricas? I do not worship your gods, and I will not be married before that altar.”

Eugenides stared at nothing, numb. If he felt anything, it was that he was falling through space, as all thieves fall when their god forsakes them. Without a word, and without meeting Attolia’s eyes, he left. Walking quickly, he crossed the empty room without turning his head. Attolia stood and would have followed him, but Eddis stopped her with a hand on her arm.

Attolia looked at her. “You knew,” she said.

“That he had been betrayed by the gods? I guessed,” said Eddis.

E
UGENIDES MOVED LIKE A SLEEPWALKER
down a hallway he didn’t see, remembering the sound of hammers as he had hidden in bushes near the city walls. Remembering, he began to move faster, down the long hallway to the kitchens, through them without speaking to a soul, and out to the animal pens in one of the lower courtyards of the palace. There were pigs kept there, and goats. He demanded a kid from the puzzled stable hand and carried it, wriggling, back into the palace.

There were many empty rooms in the palace. Eugenides knew of one that had been a solarium until recent building had obstructed its sunlight and left it too cold and too dark to be useful. With no anterooms between it and the hallway outside, and with a row of load-bearing pillars dividing the room in two, it was awkwardly sized and located. It was rarely used and had made a good hiding place on his previous visits. There was a stone table that would do for an altar. Anyone
could make an altar, anyone could consecrate it with a sacrifice. Not everyone received a response from the gods, but Eugenides never doubted his invocation would be answered.

Shifting the kid under his right arm, Eugenides took a candle from a sconce as he walked. He passed people as he climbed back up the staircase. No one spoke to him. People stepped away and watched quietly as he passed. He climbed faster and hurried down a hallway to the empty room and kicked its door closed behind him.

The table was to the right of the door, pushed against the wall. The window was opposite him, its length divided into unequal thirds and each third into many separate panes. Once it had looked out on the acropolis that rose behind the city. Now all that could be seen through it was the blank wall on the opposite side of an interior courtyard. The sun was still high, and a beam cleared the rooftops to light the sill of the window and the dust motes floating in the air.

The kid bleated as he squeezed it under one arm while he fumbled for matches to light the candle. He had a silver match case that he could open with one hand. When the candle was lit, he tilted it to let wax fall onto the table, and chanted an invocation to the Great Goddess, deliberately choosing the one he had sung over and over in the queen’s prison cell. Once sufficient wax had pooled on the tabletop, he jammed the candle down into it until it was well stuck. Then he swung the
kid out from under his arm and onto the table. It kicked, but he pinned it with his arm while he freed his knife. Deftly he slit its throat, and as the blood spilled across the table with no ceremonial bowl to catch it, he turned the knife and slid it into the body just below the cartilage at the top of the rib cage. Then he dropped to his knees. He rested his forehead against the bloody edge of the table and his forearms on the tabletop and waited.

The blood cooled and dried. He went on waiting, unmoving, growing stiff and cold.

“The door won’t open, Your Majesty,” said one of the servants.

The door had no lock, but Attolia wasn’t surprised that it was fastened closed. She hadn’t expected otherwise.

“Leave him,” she said. “He is talking to his gods.” The servants bowed and dispersed, murmuring a little among themselves, and Attolia knew that the news of the mad Eugenides would percolate through the palace, like water through soil. Attolians did not invest much belief in their religion. They dutifully attended temple festivals and used their gods for cursing and little else.

Eugenides knelt against the altar, his body beginning to ache and his mind numb until the daylight faded and the room was dark except for the light of the candle. A hand rested for a moment on his shoulder. He looked
up to see Moira beside him. “How did I fail the gods, that they betrayed me to Attolia?” he asked.

Moira shook her head. “Hephestia sends no message.”

“And the God of Thieves? Have I failed him, that he did not defend me? Are my gifts at his altar insufficient, that I lost his favor?”

“I cannot say, Eugenides.”

“Then I will wait here.” He laid his head back against the edge of the table.

“Eugenides,” said Moira, “you cannot demand the presence of the Great Goddess. The gods are not accountable to men.”

“I can,” said Eugenides without lifting his head. “I can demand. Whether my demands are met or not, I can demand. I can act as I choose and not as some god directs.”

“Eugenides,” Moira warned.

“You betrayed me,” said Eugenides. “Betrayed me to Attolia. You are the gods of Eddis, and you betrayed me to Attolia and to the Mede.” His hand fanned out for a moment in the sticky blood on the table before clenching again into a fist. “You betrayed me, and I can demand to know why if I choose.”

“Eugenides, no,” Moira warned for the third time.

“Yes!” screamed Eugenides, and the windows of the solarium shattered and the air was filled with broken glass.

“Rare the man whose gods answer him,” the queen of Attolia said dryly when an agitated household reported shattered windows throughout the palace.

As every pane of glass broke into a hundred pieces that filled the air and dropped and shattered again on the stone floor, Eugenides threw himself to the floor, covering his head with his arms. Glass pattered down over him. He lay and listened as the glass slid across stone, the fragments rubbing against each other in quiet music. The wind stopped, and the sound of the moving glass faded, but the pressure in the room grew. He could feel it against his eardrums. He was terrified. Not frightened as he had been in the past, but panicked like an animal caught in a trap or a man whose solid world shifts under his feet in an earthquake. He’d been in earthquakes before, in the mountains. He took a deep breath.

“You betrayed me,” he shouted, his voice muffled by his arms. He remembered the Mede who had appeared on the mountainside without any explanation. “Twice,” he wailed. “You betrayed me
twice.
What are the Medes, that you support them? Am I not your supplicant? Have I not sacrificed at your altars all my life?”

“And believed in us all your life?” a voice asked, a voice that was a variation in the pressure in his ears. Eugenides shuddered at the gentleness. No, he hadn’t believed. Most of the sacrifices had been for form’s sake, a meaningless ritual to him at the time.

“Have I offended the gods?” he asked in despair before rage burned the despair away. “And if I have offended the gods,” he yelled, almost unable to hear his own words, “then why didn’t I fall? It is the curse of thieves and their right to fall to their deaths, not—not—” He folded his arms across his chest, tucking the crippled one under and curling over it, unable to go on.

“Who are you to speak of rights to the gods?” the voice asked, gentle still.

The room was dark around Eugenides, and the darkness pressed him until he couldn’t breathe, until he was aware of nothing but the pressure. He was nothing, the smallest particle of dust surrounded by a myriad of other particles of dust, and put all together, they were…nothing but dust. Alone, separated from the others, in the eye of the gods he may have been, but he remained, still, dust. He struggled to inhale and whispered, “Have I offended the gods?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Then why?” he sobbed, clutching his arm tighter, though the blisters under the cuff were individual pains as sharp as knives. “Why?”

In the darkness behind his closed eyelids, Eugenides saw red fire flicker. When it was gone, the darkness afterward was a vision of a night with stars in the sky and a black silhouette that was the Sacred Mountain in Eddis. There was a gray plume of smoke, lighter than the surrounding blackness. The plume of smoke lightened,
and the stars faded as the day dawned. Then, without warning, the top of the mountain exploded and the fire returned, flashing on the undersides of a cloud of ash and smoke wider than the mountain, wider than all the valleys of Eddis. Eugenides watched as boiling rock swept down the remains of the mountain, filling the valleys with smoking ruin. He saw the houses of the city exploding one after another and the people running, a woman with a little child suddenly engulfed in flame. The ground shuddered under his feet. The red, heaving wall of melted rock bore down on him, and he couldn’t move. His skin grew warm and then hot until it felt as dry as paper and as ready to burn. He could smell the hair of his eyebrows singeing, and he still couldn’t move. He squeezed his eyes shut, but they were shut already, and the vision remained as clear. He threw himself backward and could feel the broken glass around him cutting into his skin. But he was still on his stomach and no farther from the intense heat. The magma rolled closer. He screamed and screamed again.

On her throne Attolia sat and waited. The room was empty, and the silence echoed. All night the clouds had gathered above the palace, and the thunder had rumbled. After many hours she rose and left the throne room, collecting the inevitable retinue of servants and courtiers as she left the palace and rode to the temple of the new gods. The priests must have been warned of
her coming. They met her in the pronaos and stood silently by while she wandered through the temple to the altar. She lifted the heavy gold candlesticks and carefully replaced them. She tilted the ceremonial offering bowl and listened to the musical jingle of the gold and silver disks carved with praise and supplications as they slid across the metal bottom of the bowl. She walked again the length of the temple. It was cold and empty. Perhaps the invaders’ gods had left with the invaders. She didn’t know. She knew only that the room was empty, as empty as her throne room, to which she returned. She sent her court away and her servants to bed and settled herself on the throne. When everything was still, she bowed her head and spoke to the darkness.

“Give him back to me,” she said, “and I will build your altar at the highest point of the city’s acropolis and around it build a temple in which you will be honored so long as Attolia remains.” There was no answer. She sat and waited.

“Eugenides.” A voice as gentle as rain and as cool as water called his name, and he ceased his screaming to listen. “Nothing mortals make lasts; nothing the gods make endures forever. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Eugenides hoarsely. Slowly the vision of the Sacred Mountain faded. He was still on his stomach on the floor of the solarium. He sensed the solid
stone walls all around him.

“Do you know me?” the new voice asked.

“No,” Eugenides whispered.

“You sacrificed once at my altar.”

“Forgive me, goddess. I do not know you.” Beyond his conviction that it was a goddess who spoke, he could make no guess at her identity. He wasn’t sure if she meant that he had sacrificed to her years ago and stopped or that it was only once that he had made a sacrifice in her honor. He could only wonder how many different gods he had sacrificed to just once. All his life he had left sacrifices in passing at various tiny temples and altars in his own country and in Sounis and Attolia as well: a coin, or a piece of fruit, a handful of olives, a piece of jewelry he’d previously stolen and didn’t care to keep. Lately he’d been more thoughtful in his sacrifices, but he still didn’t remember most of them, only that he was careful to offer at whatever temples and altars of water immortals he encountered, hoping to make up for any lingering disfavor on the part of Aracthus. He’d made a particularly nice sacrifice at the altar of Aracthus before he’d stepped into the chasm of his watercourse, but that hadn’t been his first sacrifice to the river, and anyway, it was a goddess who spoke. A goddess to whom he clearly should have paid greater attention.

“You are thinking as I stand between you and the Great Goddess that perhaps you have dedicated your
sacrifices all these years in error?” Her voice was amused.

Eugenides said nothing.

“Do not offend one power to attain the favor of another. The Thief is your god, but remember, no god is all-powerful, not even the Great Goddess.”

She was silent then, long enough for Eugenides to wonder if she was gone and if he dared raise his head and if what had happened was all that would happen. Finally she spoke again.

“Little Thief,” she said, “what would you give to have your hand back?”

Eugenides almost lifted his head.

“Oh, no,” said the goddess. “It is beyond my power and that of the Great Goddess as well. What’s done is done, even with the gods. But if the hand could be restored, what would you give? Your eyesight?” The voice paused, and Eugenides remembered begging Galen, the physician, to let him die before he was blind. “Your freedom?” The goddess went on. “Your sanity? Think, Eugenides, before you question the gods. You have much still to lose.”

Softly Eugenides asked, “Why did my gods betray me?”

“Have they?” asked the goddess as softly.

“To Attolia, to the Mede…” Eugenides stuttered.

“Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?”

Eugenides’s eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight.

“You have your answer, Little Thief.” And she was gone.

Eugenides slept and woke again in the dark. He was on his back, he realized. He was in bed. There was no fire in the hearth, but it was a clear night, and there was enough light to see Eddis sitting in a chair nearby.

He cleared his throat. “The mountain,” he said. “I saw the mountain explode.”

“I know,” said Eddis.

“You’ve seen it?” asked Eugenides.

“In my dreams since midwinter.”

Eugenides moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as if trying to shake the memories away. “Once was awful enough for me. When do you think?”

“Not soon,” said Eddis, leaning toward him to rest a hand on his forehead. “Someday, but perhaps not in our lifetime. Hephestia has warned us, so there will be time to prepare.” She reassured him, and he slept again.

When he next woke, it was day, and the room was filled with light. He turned to see if Eddis was still beside him and found Attolia, patiently waiting for him to open his eyes. She was sitting with her hands folded, staring into the distance, but she must have seen his movement because she shifted to meet his gaze.