The Thief (3 page)

The heat grew intolerable, and I grew more exhausted with every lurch of the horse I was riding. After what seemed like hours of swaying in the saddle, I realized that a fall was inevitable if we didn’t stop. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m tired.”

There was no response; the magus didn’t even turn his head, so I made a decision for myself. I slid sideways down one side of the horse, trusting that the leg I left behind would come after me. It did, though not gracefully; the horse was still moving as I reached the ground, and I had to hop a few steps on one leg until my other leg caught up. Once I had both feet planted in the dust of the road, I headed for the grass beside it. I stepped into a ditch and, coming out of it, stumbled onto my knees and then onto my stomach and didn’t get up.

The soldier must have come after me like a shot. I felt his fingers grab for my shirt as I fell. Everyone else dismounted and trooped across the ditch as well, until they were standing around me in a half circle. I opened my eyes for a moment to look at their boots, then closed them again.

“What’s the matter with him, magus?” It must have been the younger one that asked.

“Gods damn. We’re only halfway to Methana, and I wanted to get to Matinaea tonight. He’s exhausted, that’s all. Not enough food to keep him going. No, just leave him,” as someone prodded me with a boot.

Oh, thank gods, I thought. They’re going to leave me. All I wanted to do was lie in the dry prickly grass with my feet in a ditch forever. I could be a convenient sort of milemarker, I thought. Get to the thief and you know you are halfway to Methana. Wherever Methana might be.

But they didn’t leave me. They unsaddled their horses and got out their lunches and sat and ate while I slept.

When the sun was halfway down the sky, Pol nudged me with one foot until I woke up. I twitched my eyes open and had no idea at all where I was. I wasn’t in bed. I wasn’t at home. I’d woken up several times disoriented in the prison, and I automatically stifled my first thrash of surprise to prevent my chains from grinding on old bruises, and finally I remembered that there were no chains. I crossed one arm over my face and moaned convincingly. I felt surprisingly well. I was as hungry as a donkey, but my head was clear. I sat up and rubbed at the stiffness on the side of my face where the grass had left its rough pattern.

I groaned and complained while Pol, single-handed, pushed me back up onto the horse and we all started down the road again. The magus rode beside me and handed me pieces of cheese and lumps of bread that he tore off a loaf as we went. I ate with one hand and held on with the other. Horses are the most awful means of transport. I wanted to ask why they hadn’t brought a cart, but I was too busy eating.

We made it to Methana as the sun was going down. It was a small town with just a few houses and an inn at an intersection of roads. We didn’t stop. We rode on until it was pitch-dark. The moon was just a tiny sickle, and the soldier dismounted to lead his horse. He walked slowly to avoid stepping into the ditch by the roadside, and the other horses followed his.

The night air was cool, but my wonderful nap was a long way behind me. I balanced on the narrow back of my horse and wished the saddle offered more support. My head drooped forward and then bobbed back. The magus must have had eyes like a thief because he told Pol to stop and dismounted to walk alongside me, one hand resting just above my knee, ready to shake me if I fell asleep. He shook hard and resorted to pinching periodically.

We reached Matinaea at last. It was no bigger than Methana had been, but more roads met there. The inn was two stories tall and had a gate beside it that led to an enclosed courtyard. As we rode up, a groomsman came to take the horses. We all slid to the ground, and Pol was quickly beside me with one hand firmly on my shoulder. It was an easy business for him; my shoulder came only to his chest. Sometimes it bothers me that I am so small. It bothered me then, and I shrugged my shoulder in irritation, but his hand didn’t move.

The magus introduced himself as a traveling landholder to the owner of the inn and said that he had sent
a messenger ahead to arrange rooms. The owner was delighted to see him, and we all trooped toward the doorway. As I passed the owner’s wife, her nose wrinkled, and as I reached the door, she protested.

“That one,” she accused, pointing at me. “It’s that one that smells so awful, and he’s not coming into my wineroom and I won’t have him sleeping in any of my clean beds.”

Her husband made futile hushing motions with his hands.

“No, I won’t have it. Not if he’s your lordship’s son,” she said to the magus. “Although I hope he’s not.”

I could feel my face getting hot as the blood rushed all the way up to my ears. The magus and the woman negotiated, over the husband’s protests. The magus said no, I couldn’t sleep in the barn, but I could sleep on the floor. He gave her an extra silver coin and promised I would wash immediately. She gave directions to the pump in the courtyard, and Pol led me away.

The pump was in the middle of the courtyard behind the inn. There were stables on two sides, a wall on the third and the back of the inn completed the courtyard. It was not a private place to take a bath. When we reached the pump, Pol grabbed my shirt at the waist and jerked it upward. I snapped my arms down to prevent it from going over my head. The fabric tore in his hands. He reached for me again, but I stepped away, drowsiness gone.

“This,” I snapped, “I can do for myself.”

“Just make sure it’s a good job,” he said before he began to pump. The water gushed out of a pipe at the height of my waist as I stripped out of my overshirt and dumped it on the cobbles. I pulled off my shoes, I had no stockings, so the pants followed immediately after. As the water splashed off the cobblestones and onto my naked legs, gooseflesh came out under the dirt. I shivered and swore as I bent into the stream.

While I rinsed under the pump, the younger Useless arrived. He kept well away from the splattering water.

“Put those down in a dry spot,” said Pol, “and fetch a couple of sacks from the stable.”

When Useless came back, Pol took one of the sacks he’d brought and handed it to me with a square block of soap. Crouching beside the water, I soaked the sack and rubbed the soap across it. It made a tremendous lather, and I stopped to smell it in surprise. I laughed. It was the magus’s scented soap. Useless the Younger must have dug it out of one of the saddlebags.

I scrubbed myself with the sacking, washing away what felt like years of dirt. I rubbed hard and then rinsed and soaped myself up again before Pol could stop pumping water. I dragged the sack across the back of my neck and as much of my shoulders as I could reach and scrubbed my face again and again, thinking to myself that my nose would be smaller, but at least it would be clean.

The younger Useless stood and watched, and I wondered what he thought of me. The iron waistband had left deep bruises in a circle around my waist, and I was covered in flea bites and sores, but the ones on my wrists were the worst. Where the manacles had chafed there were raw spots partially covered in scabs that were black against my prison-fair skin. Once I had cleaned most of the dirt off myself and rinsed my hair, I squatted down in front of the spraying water and tried to find the place where the water would fall most gently on my wrists. Several of the sores were infected, and they needed to be cleaned out, but it was going to be a painful business. My whole body was shaking with the cold, and I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering while I leaned into the water.

Pol stepped around the pump and leaned over me to look at the sores. The water flow slackened.

“Leave them,” he said. “I’ll work on them inside.” He gave me another piece of sacking to dry off with, and when I was done, he handed me a pile of clothes—pants and a shirt as well as an overshirt and a pair of stout workboots. I looked around for my own clothes and saw the younger Useless disappearing into the stable with them in his arms.

“Hey,” I yelled. “Come back with those!”

He turned around uncertainly. “Magus told me to burn them,” he said.

“Everything but my shoes!”

Useless looked into the pile in his arms and wrinkled his nose. “All right, but if Magus says to burn them, you’ll have to give them back.”

“Fine, fine,” I said as I hopped across the wet cobblestones in my bare feet and took my shoes out of his arms. The rest of the clothing I consigned to the fires without regret, but I’d had the shoes made specially. They were low boots just a little higher than my ankles, reinforced on the soles, but still supple enough to let me move unsuspected through other people’s houses. I carried them back to Pol; then I looked for a dry place to stand while I got dressed. The pants were heavy cotton and bagged at the ankle where they tucked into my shoes. They bagged even more around my waist, but there was a belt to hold them up. The shirt was cotton as well. There was something wonderful about rubbing a clean shirt against clean skin. I was smiling by the time I pulled the overshirt over my head. It was dark blue and short-sleeved. It came down to my thighs and was enough too big that when I moved my arms across my chest, it didn’t bind. I checked to be sure.

“Gods bless that magus, he thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” I said to Pol. He grunted and waved me toward the inn’s back door.

We went inside to the taproom, where the magus and the two Uselesses were waiting for us. There were deep bowls of stew set out on the table, but before Pol would let me have mine, he wanted to look at my
wrists. The magus looked over his shoulder and then sent the elder Useless up to his room to get a relief kit with bandages and little pots of salve in it.

Pol got one of the lanterns off the wall and put it on the table beside him. The landlady tsk-tsked and brought out a bowl of warm water, a cloth, and more soap. Pol started to work on the right wrist first, while I looked at my dinner regretfully. After he had rinsed it with the soapy water, he rubbed a little salve on top of the scabs on the two sores, one above each of the bones in my wrist. Then he wrapped the wrist carefully in a clean white bandage. It was a tidy job, and I was impressed. I was off my guard when he took up my left arm. There was just one sore, but it ran all the way across the top of my wrist. Instead of a scab it had raw patches and bubbles of fluid trapped under flaps in the skin. Without any warning, Pol slid a knife under one of the flaps and twisted it open.

I screamed at the top of my lungs. Everyone in the room jumped, including Pol, but his knife was well away from my wrist by then. I struggled to get out of his grip, but he had his hand clamped on my forearm, and he held on like a vise. I tried with my right hand to pry his fingers loose, but they didn’t budge. As I went on yelling and twisting his fingers, Pol without a word put his knife down on the table and reached into the relief kit. What he brought out was the wooden gag they put in someone’s mouth before doing something
drastic like cutting off a leg. He held it up in front of my face.

“That’s enough,” he said.

I thought about explaining that that sore had been there for weeks. I’d been so careful not to let the manacles bang it, and I’d favored it and done everything I could to keep it from hurting anymore and he could have warned me before he stuck his great godsdamned knife into it. But I looked at the gag in his hand and shut my mouth. I contented myself with wiggling and whimpering a little as he opened each of the infected spots, cleaned the entire sore, and rubbed salve onto it. When he had it wrapped in a bandage, I sniffed and wiped my nose and turned to the table to eat my dinner.

Useless the Elder was looking at me in amusement. “Not exactly stalwart, are you?” he said.

I told him what he could do with his own dinner and got a poke in the rib cage from Pol’s elbow. I sulked through the first few bites of my stew before I noticed how good it was. While I savored it, I listened to the others talking and gathered that the older Useless was named Ambiades and the younger Sophos. They weren’t related to each other, but they were both apprentices of the magus. I ate until I was too exhausted to keep my head up anymore and fell asleep on the table with the last bite still in my mouth.

I
WOKE IN THE MORNING
in one of the inn’s upstairs rooms, lying on the floor. From where I lay, I could see the webbing underneath the bed next to me and how much it sagged under Pol’s weight. He must have carried me in and laid me out on the rug before going to sleep himself. I looked enviously at his bed, but at least I was on a wood floor, not a stone one. There was a rug underneath me and a blanket pulled over me.

I reached up with one hand and pushed the hair off my face. I usually wore it long enough to wrap into a stubby braid at the base of my neck, but it had grown beyond that in prison. Sometime during my arrest I had lost the tie that held it, and it had been hanging down in my face and tangling into knots ever since. The previous night’s rinsing had washed out some of the dirt, but the tangles were still there. I thought about borrowing a knife from Pol and cutting it all off but discarded the idea. Pol wouldn’t lend me the knife, but he’d cut
the hair off himself, and that would be painful. Besides, I liked my hair long. When it was clean and pulled back from my face, I liked to think it gave me an aristocratic look, and it was useful. I sometimes caught small items in the hair at the top of the braid and hid them there.

Still, matted and tangled, the hair was not aristocratic. I pushed it off my forehead for the time being and sat up. Pol’s eyes opened as I moved, and I discarded any thoughts of sneaking away even before I discovered that I was chained to the bed. My ankle was padded by someone’s spare shirt, and locked around it was an iron cuff with a chain that looped around the leg of the bed. Only by lifting the bed, with Pol in it, could I have gotten free. I wondered whose idea the shirt and the blanket had been. Pol didn’t seem like a man sensitive to personal comforts.

I had another wash, this time with warm water in a washroom at the end of the hallway outside the room. The magus and his two apprentices were already there, stripped to the waist, splashing water around as they got themselves clean. They looked up as Pol and I came in, and I could see that they all three expected me to resent more soap and water.

“I washed last night,” I pointed out to the magus. “Look”—I held up my arms—“I’m very clean. Why am I washing again?”

The magus stepped away from the basin that held his shaving water and caught one of my arms. He was
careful to grip it above the clean white bandages before he turned my hand over and held it up to my face so that I could see the black dirt still ingrained in the folds of my skin.

“Wash,” he commanded, and before I could protest further, Pol grabbed me from behind and pushed me over toward an empty basin lying next to the others on a shelf that ran waist height along the wall. Holding the back of my neck with one hand, he lifted a pitcher with another and poured steaming water into the basin.

“I can wash myself,” I pointed out to no effect.

He added a washing cloth and soap and went to work on my face. When I opened my mouth to complain, I got soap in it. I attempted to slip away, but could not. The hand Pol had on my neck stretched easily from one side of it to the other. He was merciless to my bruises, and I did my best to stamp on his toes in retaliation. He squeezed harder on my neck until I stopped. He soaped my shoulders and bent me at the waist with another squeeze, in order to soap my back. Bent over, I saw that his knees were within reach. I might have grabbed one and thrown him to the floor, but I didn’t try. This was no time to demonstrate unsuspected abilities. Besides, if I missed the grab, I would only look silly and I had had enough of that.

Pol rinsed off the soap with a pitcher of water. I pulled myself upright and tried to look disdainful, but the bath wasn’t over. Pol marched me across the room
to a wooden tub full of water and pushed my head under while I was still howling in outrage. He lifted me out, and while I coughed, he rubbed more soap into my hair and pushed me under again.

When the grip in his fingers finally lessened, I dragged myself away and threw myself, dripping water, to the other side of the bathroom. I watched him warily while I coughed the water out of my lungs. He stood patiently while I twisted water out of my hair. When I snarled that I could have more easily washed myself, he tossed me a towel, and then he lifted one arm and gestured leisurely with a finger toward the door.

His face was almost expressionless, but the corners of his mouth twitched. Jutting out my jaw to conceal the expression on my own face, I stalked down the hall and recovered my shirt and overshirt from the room where I had slept.

“You got my pants wet,” I complained as I pulled on my shirt. The waistband was soaked.

Pol didn’t respond.

I was still pulling my overshirt over my head as I thumped down the stairs to the taproom, where breakfast and the others were waiting. The magus and his apprentices were smiling at their food. I threw myself onto the end of the bench and ignored them.

After I had eaten one bowl of oatmeal, I combed my fingers through my hair to get it into some sort of order. Tearing a few knots apart in the process, I divided it into
three clumps and wound the clumps over one another to make a short braid. Holding the end of the braid in one hand, I looked around the taproom for inspiration. Over my shoulder I saw a young woman at the bar. I smiled at her and circled one finger around the tip of the braid to show what I needed. When she smiled at me and waved one hand to show that she understood, I turned back to the table to meet the ferocious glare of Useless the Elder, whose name I remembered was Ambiades. I didn’t know what had irritated him, so I directed my puzzled look on my oatmeal bowl.

A few minutes later the girl from the bar arrived with more breakfast for everyone and a piece of twine to tie off my hair. As she went away, she looked over at Useless the Elder and sniffed in contempt, so I had an explanation for the ferocious glare. No friend had I made there, but I wasn’t with this group to make friends, and besides, he sneered too much. I’ve found that people who sneer are almost always sneering at me.

The magus, Pol, and the younger Useless, Sophos, were studiously eating their breakfasts.

“She seems like a nice girl,” I said, and got an angry look from Ambiades and his master. The magus couldn’t have been rebuffed by the barkeep, so I assumed that he didn’t want me baiting his apprentice.

“Very friendly,” I added for good measure before I dug into my second large bowl of oatmeal. It was a little bit gloppy, but there was butter and honey on top.
There was a bowl of yogurt nearby, and I ate that as well. Sophos had a smaller bowl, and when the magus wasn’t looking, I slipped it out from under his lifted spoon and switched it for my empty one. He looked startled, and Ambiades stifled a derisive laugh, but neither of them complained to the magus. There was another large bowl that held oranges in the middle of the table, and I was reaching for those when I noticed the magus’s glare.

“I’m hungry,” I said defensively, and took three. Two went into the pockets of the overshirt, and the third I peeled and was eating when the landlady arrived.

She came to ask us if we wanted a lunch packed, but she stopped in surprise when she saw me.

I gave her my best boyish grin. “I clean up nicely, don’t I?” I said.

She smiled back. “Yes, you do. Where did you get so dirty?”

“Prison,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. People went to prison all the time. “I expect you’re glad to get out.”

“Yes, ma’am, especially because the food is so good.”

She laughed and turned back to the magus, who was looking grim. “Was there anything else that you needed, sir?”

“No, we’ll stop in Evisa for lunch, thank you.”

Everyone went to pack up the horses except the magus and me. The two of us remained at the table
until Pol sent Sophos in to tell us that everything was ready. There was a mounting block in the courtyard, so I was able to get onto my horse myself, although Pol held its head and Sophos held the stirrup for me and offered advice.

“You don’t have to slither on that way,” he said. “She isn’t going to move out from underneath you.”

“She might,” I replied sourly.

As we rode our horses out of the courtyard, the landlady stepped out of the inn’s front door with a napkin-wrapped bundle in her hand. She reached up to stop my horse with one hand, which was pretty fearless of her, but she seemed to think it was nothing out of the ordinary.

“A little something to eat while you’re riding. It’s a long way to Evisa.” She handed the bundle up to me and added as she did so, “My youngest is down in the prison.”

“Oh,” I said, not surprised. They probably hadn’t bribed the tax collector enough. “Don’t worry too much,” I said as the magus dragged my horse away. “It’s not so bad.” I forgot myself enough to give her a real smile but replaced it with a grin when I saw her face brighten in response.

“What a lie that was,” I added under my breath as we left the inn behind. The road curved away between rows of olive trees. As soon as we were well out of sight, the magus pulled up his horse and mine as well.

He leaned across his saddle and smacked me on the head, then pulled away the bundle of lunch, which I had hung on a convenient buckle of the saddle.

“Hey!” I yelled in outrage. “That was for me!”

“I don’t need you chatting up every barkeep between here and the mountains.”

“I didn’t say a word to the barkeep,” I pointed out in an aggrieved tone as I rubbed the spot on my head where his heavy seal ring had hit. “Not a word. And I was only being polite to the landlady.”

The magus lifted his hand to hit me again, but I leaned out of reach. “You can keep your civility,” he snapped, “to yourself. You don’t talk to anyone, do you understand?”

“So, so, so. Do I get my lunch back?”

No, I didn’t. Magus said we would have it later. I sulked for the next hour. I looked at my saddle and ignored the passing scenery—I’d seen onions before—until we rode by a field being harvested. The sweet, tangy smell woke my stomach. I sat up straight and looked around. “Hey,” I called to the magus, “I’m hungry.”

He ignored me, but I decided against prolonged sulking. It wasn’t going to get me an early lunch, and my neck was sore, from bending over the saddle. I dug one of the oranges out of my pocket and began to peel it, dropping the rinds on the road. Outside the city I had felt like a bug caught out in the center of a
tablecloth. Now the world was closing back in in a comforting way. The road rose slowly and dropped into an occasional hollow as we climbed the hills that led up to the mountains in the north of the country. The fields were smaller, and they were surrounded by olive trees, which grew where other crops wouldn’t. Individual orchards were blending together into an undifferentiated forest of silver and gray. I wondered how the owners knew when their land stopped and someone else’s began.

On my left Sophos asked, “Was it really not so bad?”

“Was what?”

“Prison.”

I remembered my comment to the landlady. I watched Sophos for a minute, riding comfortably on the back of his well-bred mare.

“That prison,” I said with heartfelt sincerity, “was absolutely the most awful thing that has happened to me in my entire life.”

I could tell by the way he looked at me that he thought my life must have been filled with one awful thing after another.

“Oh,” he said, and pressed his horse a little faster, in order to widen the space between us.

Pol continued to ride behind me. I looked over my shoulder at him and got a stony glare. I ate my orange and listened to the conversation between the magus,
Sophos, and Ambiades. He was asking them questions. He wanted Sophos to tell him the classification of a eucalyptus tree. Sophos went on about this and that and whether it was fruit-bearing. Most of what he said I couldn’t hear, but he seemed to have gotten it right because the magus told him he was pleased. Ambiades had more trouble with the olive tree, and the magus was not pleased. Ambiades shifted his horse a little farther away from the magus, and I gathered that cuffs to the head with that seal ring were not uncommon. The magus asked Sophos for the correct answer, and Sophos gave it, obviously embarrassed for Ambiades’s sake.

“Sophos seems to have been paying attention, Ambiades. Would you like to hazard a guess why this sort of classification is important?”

“Not really,” said Ambiades.

“Do it anyway,” said the magus.

“Oh, I guess it’s so you can tell which trees should be planted where.”

“Go on.”

But Ambiades couldn’t think of anything else.

Sophos tried to help him out. “If you found a new tree, you might be able to tell if you could eat the fruit if you knew it was just like an olive tree?”

“If it was
just
like an olive tree it would
be
one,” snapped Ambiades. I put all my weight onto one stirrup and leaned over. I wanted to get a look at Sophos’s face to see if he was blushing. He was.

“Of course,” the magus pointed out, “if you can’t classify an olive, Ambiades, you wouldn’t know one if you saw one, would you?”

I leaned over on the other stirrup. Now Ambiades was blushing. He was scowling as well.

“Try again with the fig tree,” said the magus.

Ambiades poked and guessed his way through that classification, and I lost interest. I was getting tired. I ate my second orange.

Long before we reached Evisa, I was exhausted. I complained constantly that I was tired, but no one seemed to notice. I was also hungry. I told the magus I would starve in the saddle if I didn’t get something to eat, and he finally, reluctantly, opened the bundle with my lunch in it. But he insisted on dividing it equally among Ambiades, Sophos, and myself, even though I pointed out that they couldn’t possibly be as hungry as I was.

Ambiades nobly handed over some of his portion to me, but there was something about the way he did it that made my hackles rise.

It was late in the afternoon when we reached Evisa. The magus was disgruntled that we hadn’t made better time. He hadn’t reckoned on my outstanding skill with horses.