The Thief (2 page)

I repeated myself. “I can steal anything.”

“Except yourself out of the king’s prison?” the magus asked, lifting only one eyebrow this time.

I shrugged. I could do that, too, but it would take time. It might take a long time, and I wanted the king’s magus to offer a faster way.

“Well, you’ve learned how to keep your mouth shut at least,” said the magus. He pulled himself away from his desk and walked across the room. While his back was turned, I pushed the hair away from my eyes and took another quick look around the room. It was his study, but I already knew that. There were books and old scrolls in piles on the shelves. There was a scarred bench piled with amphoras and other clay containers. There were glass bottles as well. At the end of the room was a curtained alcove, and barely visible under the curtain was a pair of feet in leather boots. I turned back around in my chair with my stomach jumping.

“You could shorten the time without shortening your life,” said the magus.

I looked up at him. I’d lost the thread of the conversation. In the moment it took me to recover it, I realized that he was now nervous himself. I relaxed in my seat. “Go on.”

“I want you to steal something.”

I smiled. “Do you want the king’s seal? I can get it for you.”

“If I were you,” said the magus, “I’d stop bragging about that.” His voice grated.

My smile grew. The gold ring with the engraved ruby had been in his safekeeping when I had stolen it away. Losing it, I was sure, had badly damaged his standing at the king’s court. He glanced over my shoulder at the curtained alcove, and then he got to the point.

“There’s something I want you to steal. Do this for me, and I’ll see that you don’t go back to prison. Fail to do this for me, and I will still make sure that you don’t go back to prison.”

Prisoners left the king’s prison all the time. Masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, any skilled craftsmen could expect to finish their sentences working for the king’s profit. Unskilled workers were collected several times a year and sent to the silver mines south of the city. They rarely returned, and other prisoners just disappeared.

It was clear enough what the magus had in mind, so I nodded. “What am I stealing?” That was all I cared about.

The magus dismissed the question. “You can find out the details later. What I need to know now is that you’re capable.” That I hadn’t been overcome by disease, crippled, or starved beyond usefulness while in prison.

“I’m capable,” I said. “But I have to know what I’m stealing.”

“You’ll be told. For now it isn’t your business.”

“What if I can’t steal it?”

“I thought that you could steal anything,” he taunted.

“Except myself out of the king’s prison,” I agreed.

“Don’t try to be smart.” The magus shook his head. “You don’t pretend well.” I opened my mouth to say something I shouldn’t have, but he went on. “It will require some traveling to reach my object. There will be plenty of time for you to learn about it as we go.”

I sat back in my chair, mollified and delighted. If I got out of the city of Sounis, no one would bring me back. The magus had to have known exactly what I was thinking because he leaned close over me again.

“Don’t think that I am a fool.”

He wasn’t a fool, that much was true. But he didn’t have my motivation. He leaned back against the desk, and I sat back in my chair thinking that the gods had listened to my prayers at last. Then I heard the rings on the top of the curtain behind me slide across their rod, and I remembered the two feet in the alcove. My stomach, which had settled a little, began to jump again.

The boots stamped across the room, and a hand came over the back of the chair in order to grab me by the hair. The owner of the hand lifted me up as he walked to the front of the chair and held me facing him. “Don’t think that I am a fool either,” he said.

He was short, just as his father had been, and stocky. His hair was a dark gold color and curled around his ears. It would have looked effeminate on anyone else. It probably endeared him to his mother when he was a child, but there was nothing endearing about him now. My hair was pulling free of my head, and I was standing on the tips of my toes to relieve the strain. I put both hands on top of his, tried to push the hand down, and found myself hanging entirely off the ground.

He dropped me. My legs folded under me, and I sat on the floor with a thump that jarred my entire body. I
rubbed my head, trying to push the hair back into my scalp. When I looked up, the king was wiping his hand on the front of his clothes.

“Get up,” he said.

I did, still rubbing my head.

The king of Sounis was not polished. Nor was he an impressive bearlike man the way kings were in my mother’s fairy tales. He was too short and too oily, and he was a shade too fat to be elegant. But he was shrewd. He routinely doubled his taxes and kept a large army to prevent any rebellion by his citizens. The taxes supported the army, and when the army itself became a threat, he sent it off to fight with his neighbors. Their victories enriched the treasury. The kingdom of Sounis was bigger than it had been anytime since the invaders had broken off pieces of it to award to their allies. The king had driven the Attolians out of their land on the Sounis side of the Hephestial Mountains, forcing them back through the narrow pass through the country of Eddis to the Attolian homeland on the far side. There were rumors that he wanted to annex land there as well and that Attolia was preparing for all-out war.

Ignoring his magus, Sounis walked over to the bench on the wall beside my chair. He pulled a small casket off it and carried it to the magus’s desk, where he tipped its contents out. A cascade of double-heavy gold coins. A single one would buy a family’s farm and all its livestock. Several pieces fell and rang on the stone floor.
One landed by my foot and lay staring up at me like a yellow eye.

I almost bent to pick it up but stopped myself and said instead, “My uncle used to keep that much under his bed and count it every night.”

“Liar,” said the king. “You’ve never seen that much gold before in your life.”

He couldn’t know that I’d overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks.

Sounis tapped the chest, lying empty on its side in front of him. “This is the gold that I am going to offer as a reward if you fail to bring back what I am sending you for. I’ll offer it to anyone, from this country or any other, who brings you to me.” He tipped the casket upright and snapped the lid down.

I felt my stomach dropping. It would be hard to outrun a reward like that. I’d be hunted from one end of the world to the other.

“I’d want you alive of course,” said the king, and carefully described the grisly things that would happen to me when I was captured. I tried to stop listening after the first few examples, but he went on and on, and I was mesmerized like a bird in front of a snake. The magus stood with his hands across his chest and listened
just as carefully. He didn’t seem nervous anymore. He must have been satisfied that the king had accepted his plans and that his threats would encourage me in my work. My stomach felt worse and worse.

My cell, when I was returned to it, felt warm and safe by comparison to the magus’s study. As soon as the guards were gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway. I concentrated on a vision of myself leaving the prison. I made myself as comfortable as possible and went to sleep.

T
WO GUARDS CAME FOR ME
late the next morning, and I was surprised again. I had thought that the traveling the magus had mentioned would take some time to plan for. He had clearly gotten the king’s approval for the plan only the previous night. My hopes, which had been falling and rising, sank again as I realized that the magus hadn’t mentioned how far we would travel. It might be no more than a few miles. But I cheered up once I was free of my chains.

The guards removed the manacles this time as well as the waist and ankle cuffs. There were no clanking noises to accompany us as we walked down the gallery past the row of cell doors to the guardroom. The only sound was the tramp of feet, the guards’, not mine, and the creaking of the leather jackets that they wore under their steel breastplates. We crossed through the guardroom to the door to the courtyard between the prison and the megaron. When the door opened, I learned in
an instant that the light of the lamps the night before had been nothing to compare with the sun itself.

It was nearly noon, and the sunlight dropped directly into the courtyard. The pale yellow of the stones in the walls reflected it from all sides. I howled and swore as I covered my head with my arms and hunched over in pain. Burning at the stake couldn’t have been worse.

It’s a funny thing that the new gods have been worshiped in Sounis since the invaders came, but when people need a truly satisfying curse, they call on the old gods. I called on all of them, one right after another, and used every curse I’d overheard in the lower city. “Gods damn,
gods
damn,” I was howling as the guards led me, completely blind, down the stairs. I still had my hands over my eyes, and they held me firmly by the elbows. My feet hardly touched the stone steps.

At the bottom the magus was waiting. He told me to pull myself together.

“Gods damn you, too,” I said through my hands. One of the guards gave me a brisk shake, and I almost cursed him as well but decided to concentrate on the pain in my eyes. It didn’t fade much, but after a few minutes, when I tilted my hands a little away from my face and looked down, I could make out the flagstones through my tears. I sniffed a little and wiped the tears away. As soon as I could manage, I pulled my hands farther from my face and tried to see what was happening around me in the courtyard. I had plenty of time.

There was an incredible amount of noise as horses crashed back and forth across the flagstones and the magus shouted at people. Not far away someone was unpacking a brace of saddlebags and scattering the contents under the feet of a nervous horse. The horse kept sidling away from the mess and was dragged back by the groom holding its head. Evidently something was missing from the saddlebags. With more swearing the magus sent the unpacker back into the castle to fetch whatever it was.

“Look for it on the bench next to the retort,” shouted the magus at the disappearing figure. “That’s where it was when I told you to pack it the first time. Idiot,” he muttered under his breath.

By the time the idiot returned, I could see he was carrying a small square leather case, which he dropped into the saddlebag. He then shoveled the waiting piles back in on top of it. The noise in the courtyard diminished as the magus stopped shouting and the horses calmed down.

I was still looking at the world through tears and the narrowest of slits between my eyelids. I counted the hazy shapes in front of me. It didn’t seem like a large party, only five horses, but all of them had humped baggage behind their saddles. It was going to be a long trip. I grinned with satisfaction. Beside me the magus looked up at the sky and said to no one in particular, “I had planned to leave at daybreak. Pol,” he shouted, “get the boys mounted. I’ll load the thief.”

I didn’t appreciate the way he spoke of me as another parcel to be dumped into a saddlebag or, in my case, a saddle. He walked over to a horse, and I could see that he gestured to me to join him, but I didn’t move. I hate horses. I know people who think that they are noble, graceful animals, but regardless of what a horse looks like from a distance, never forget that it is as likely to step on your foot as look at you.

“What?” I dissembled.

“Get on the horse, you idiot.”

“Me?”

“Of course you, you fool.”

I didn’t move, and the magus got tired of waiting. He stepped to my side, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and hauled me over to the horse. I set my heels in and resisted. If I was going to climb onto an animal eight times my size, I wanted to plan the attempt first.

The magus was a good bit stronger than I was. Holding me by the cloth at the back of my neck, he shook once or twice and my head swam. I heard the cheap cloth tear. He grabbed for a firmer grip on my neck.

“Put your left foot in the stirrup,” he said. “Your left one.”

I did as I was told, and two of the grooms stepped over to lever me into the saddle before my brains had settled. Once up, I shook the hair back out of my eyes. As I tried to get it to hook behind my ears, I looked
around. Being six feet off the ground does give one a sense of superiority. I shrugged my shoulders and crossed my arms, but the animal underneath me lurched sideways, and I had to uncross them in order to snatch at the front of the saddle. I held on while I waited for the others to mount.

Once the others were up, the magus directed his mount toward the archway at one side of the courtyard. My horse obediently followed, and the others came behind me as we passed under rooms of the palace and hallways that I had been in the night before. My eyes had a few moments of relief before we reached the outer gate. There was no fanfare, no shouting crowds to wish us luck on our journey—just as well. The only time I had been the focus of shouting crowds had been my trial, and I hadn’t enjoyed that at all.

We weren’t leaving through the main gate of the megaron, so we emptied out into a narrow street, only a little wider than the horses. My feet brushed against the whitewashed walls on either side. We twisted through more narrow streets until we reached the Sacred Way, which we followed down to the gate out of the old city. The gate was made out of blocks of stone bigger across than I am tall. Something else supposedly built by the old gods, it was topped by a solid stone lintel with two carved lions that were supposed to roar if an enemy of the king passed beneath them. At least they were said to be lions. The
stone had been weathered by the centuries, and only indistinct monster figures remained, facing each other over a short pillar. They remained silent as we passed under.

The King’s Route was wide and straight, crossing the more circuitous Sacred Way twice again before reaching the docks. When first built, the route had been bordered by stone walls that defended this road that connected the city to its harbor and its ships. The Long Walls were later dismantled to provide building materials for each new wing of the king’s megaron as it grew from a one-room stronghold to a four-story palace.

As we rode onto the avenue, the sound of our horses’ hooves was muddled with the other noises of the city. It was just before midday, and we were in the middle of the last surge of activity before people withdrew into their homes to wait out the afternoon heat. There were a few other horses on the road, and many more donkeys. People traveled on foot and in sedan chairs carried by servants. Merchants brought their goods up the avenue in carts and then led loaded donkeys down the narrow alleys to the back doors of the great houses, hoping to sell their vegetables to the cook, their linen to the housekeeper, or their wine to the steward. There was jostling and shouting and noise, and I relished it after the perpetual smothered quiet of the prison.

We threaded our way through the traffic, drawing
curious looks. My companions were dressed in sturdy traveling clothes. I was still in the clothes I had worn to prison. My tunic had started life a cheerful yellow that I’d thought was dashing when I’d gotten it from a merchant in the lower city. It had faded to a greasy beige color. In addition to the smaller tears in the elbows, it had a larger one across my shoulders, thanks to the ministrations of the king’s magus. I wondered what he thought I was going to wear if he persisted in shredding my clothes.

We crossed the upper part of the Sacred Way, and then the lower part, which held all the nicest shops in the city. Looking up and down it from the intersection, I could see the sedan chairs and fancy carriages waiting by doorways while the gently bred owners made their purchases inside. One shop near the corner sold only earrings, and I watched wistfully as it went by. We were too far away and there was too much traffic to allow even a glimpse of the merchandise displayed in its window.

Once we got to the lower town, traffic thinned out as people retreated indoors. I looked in vain for a familiar face. I wanted to tell someone I knew that I was free, but I didn’t know very many people who would be out on the street in the middle of the day. When we reached the docks, we turned and rode along beside them toward the north gate out of the city. We passed the merchant ships and a pier full of private boats for fishing
and pleasure and then the king’s warships lined up at their docks. I was counting the cannons bolted to their decks and almost didn’t see Philonikes passing by me.

“Philonikes!” I yelled, leaning out of the saddle. “Hey, Philonikes!” It was as much as I said before the magus grabbed my arm and dragged me away. He kicked his horse into a trot, and mine as well, as he hauled me down the street. I turned backward to wave to Philonikes disappearing around a corner, but I am not sure that he recognized me. The magus turned another corner before we slowed down, the other four riders hurrying to catch up.

“Damn it!” said the magus. “What do you think you are doing?”

I pointed backward and looked bewildered. “Philo’s a friend of mine. I was going to say hello.”

“Do you think I want everyone in the city to know that you are out working for the king?”

“Why not?”

“Do you announce that you’re going off to steal something before you start?” He thought for a second. “Yes, you do. Well, I don’t.”

“Why not?” I asked again.

“None of your business. Just keep your mouth shut, do you understand?”

“Sure.” I shrugged.

The knot we made of horses and riders in the middle of the street broke up as we restarted our journey. I
ducked my head to hide my smile as my horse clopped along after the magus’s.

At the south gate we went once again through a cool tunnel, this one much longer than the one through the megaron. It passed under the sloping earthwork and newer city wall. Then we were out in the sunshine again. Not that the city ended at the walls. The invaders in their officious and sensible way had brought prosperity to the city, and it had never stopped growing larger than its boundaries. We rode past the fine houses of the merchants who chose not to live squeezed into the city. Over the tops of garden walls we could see the citrus, the fig, and the almond trees, shading the grass or the edge of a veranda. The horses provided a sort of moving platform, allowing glimpses into other people’s privacy. I would have preferred to climb the walls and look my fill. I didn’t like the way the view kept disappearing behind the dark green leaves of an orange tree just as I got interested.

Beyond the villas the farms began. The fields stretched perfectly flat on either side of us for miles in every direction. There was not even an undulation in the ground, it seemed, until the road reached the foothills of the Hephestial Mountains, many miles ahead of us. Somewhere on our right, between us and the sea, should have been the river Seperchia, but I couldn’t see it, even from the back of a horse. I stood up
in my stirrups to look, but I could only guess that the water was hidden behind a line of trees that grew along its banks. My knees began to quiver after only a moment, so I sat down again. The horse made a little huffing noise of complaint.

“Don’t pull on the reins,” the man on my right said.

I looked down at the pieces of leather held in my hands and dropped them altogether. The animal obviously knew where it was going without my guidance. We passed field after field of onions and an occasional smaller field of cucumber or watermelon. The watermelons were as big as my head, so it was later in the summer than I’d thought. It had taken a long time to get out of prison.

We rode on through the heat. The late-summer winds, the etesians, hadn’t come yet, and nothing moved in the entire landscape. The sun beat down, and even the dust didn’t try to rise. We passed a grove of olive trees set out in front of a farmhouse. Their silver green leaves could have been carved out of stone.

In the city I had wanted to hug the sunlight and wrap it around myself like a blanket. I’d turned my body in the saddle in order to expose as much of my skin as possible to direct light. It was pleasant at first, but by the time the city was a single lump of gold stone behind us, I felt as if I were wearing a coat of dirt and dried sweat that had shrunk to be two sizes too small. I itched everywhere. The smells of the prison floated down the
road with me, and I think that even the horse underneath me objected.

I noticed that as the sun got hotter, the two riders on either side of me moved farther and farther away.

I looked over the party. The magus I had already studied. On my right was the soldier who warned me about pulling on the reins. His profession was obvious, as was the sword tucked under the flap of one of his saddlebags. I guessed that he was the Pol that the magus had shouted to in the courtyard, because the other two members of the group were certainly the boys. One younger and one several years older, I guessed, than myself. Why they were with us, I couldn’t imagine. The older one also had a sword in a scabbard, and with coaching he could probably chop up a straw man, but the younger one looked to be completely useless. They were both obviously well bred, not servants, and I wondered if they were brothers. Like the magus, they were dressed in dark blue tunics that flared at the waist over their trousers. The older one had darker hair and was the better-looking. He looked as if he knew it. Riding on my left, he wrinkled his nose whenever a small wind wafted from my direction, but he never looked over at me. The younger boy rode mostly behind me, and every time I turned my head to glance at him, I found him staring back. I identified them as Useless the Elder and Useless the Younger for the time being.