The Thief (8 page)

“The magus?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you before?”

“One of my father’s villas. On the Eutoas River. It was nice there.”

“But?”

“My father came for a visit and found out that I couldn’t fence and I couldn’t ride and I didn’t like to go hunting. I liked to read instead.” Sophos rolled his eyes. “He threw my riding instructor and my fencing instructor and my tutor out the front gate of the villa. Then he said Pol would teach me riding and fencing and I’d live with him in the city, where he could keep an eye on me.”

“Pol is your father’s man?” I glanced over my shoulder and met Pol’s eyes for an instant before I turned back to Sophos.

“He’s captain of my father’s guard.”

I whistled soundlessly. A man’s son has to be pretty important to him if he has the captain of his own guard give him riding lessons and then does without his captain altogether so the son can have a bodyguard.

The olive groves changed in character as we moved through them. Instead of tightly packed rows of trees, there began to be space between the trunks. The
irrigation ditches thickened with weeds and silt and were eventually choked out of existence. More dry oaks appeared, and we were eventually riding between trees that had gone entirely back to the wild.

“Doesn’t anyone harvest these olives?” Sophos asked as he saw signs of old fruit rotted in the grass.

The magus overheard him. “Not anymore,” he said over his shoulder. “Since the plague there aren’t enough people in Attolia to harvest all these trees. The town where we bought provisions was probably once responsible for this part of the Sea of Olives, but there are only five or six families living there now, and they manage only the groves nearest them.”

I knew about the plague years that had come thirty years before I was born. It had traveled with the trading ships across the middle sea, seeping through the lowlands and killing off entire families. In the wineshops in the city they said that as many as half the people in Sounis had died. All sea trade stopped. The crops rotted in the field, and Eddis had closed her passes, trying to keep the sickness out. My grandfather, who had been a young man during the plague years, had told me that no thief would touch the possessions of a plague victim for fear of contagion. Everything was burned.

“Are there places like this in Sounis,” asked Sophos, “where there aren’t enough people to farm the cultivated land?”

“Not many,” the magus answered. “Sounis has always been a smaller country than Attolia, and so it already has a surplus population again. There are a few abandoned farms—the place we stayed before starting up the mountain, for example. The single surviving member of that family left the farm in order to go to the city to get an education.”

“How do you know?” asked Sophos, always one to miss the obvious.

“I was he.” The magus glanced over at me. Our horses, never moving swiftly between the trees, had stopped, and mine dropped its head to collect a snatch of tender grass. After a moment he said, “It’s astonishing, Gen, but you are obviously thinking something, and I am curious to know what it is.”

I was thinking of my numerous relatives, most of whom I had always considered a grievous burden, but if there hadn’t been one that I loved, I wouldn’t have landed myself in the king’s prison. It was better, I supposed, to have all of them than none. I think it was the first generous thought I have ever had about some of my cousins. I told the magus, “I have an overabundance of relations, and I wonder if I am better off than you.”

“You could be.” He nudged his horse onward.

After a while Sophos started talking again. He was rarely quiet for long. “If there aren’t enough people left in the village, why don’t people move from somewhere else?”

“Where else?” the magus asked.

“The rest of Attolia?” Sophos hesitantly suggested.

“They’re dead, too, stupid,” Ambiades answered, and the magus winced.

“The plague thinned the population across the entire country,” he explained more gently. “There are very few surplus people anywhere. Even in the cities.”

“They could come from Sounis.”

“Yes. They could.” That was clearly what the king of Sounis had in mind.

“That would be an invasion,” I said.

“So?” Ambiades challenged me.

“So the Attolians might object.”

“But they aren’t even using the land, Gen,” Sophos protested. I wondered how he would feel if the positions were reversed and it was Attolia annexing the land of his people.

“They might object anyway,” I said.

“That won’t matter,” said the magus.

“It will to the Attolians,” I said to my horse.

At the end of that day we reached the edge of the Sea of Olives. We’d been following a wagon track, long overgrown. When it turned south, the magus led us away from it, back between the trees. A quarter of a mile further on the trees ended as if the gods had drawn a line across the earth from the cliffs on our left down to the river somewhere out of sight on our right. The
mountains were black against the pink and blue evening sky. They’d been hidden by the trees for a long time, and it was reassuring to see them again.

Ahead of us there were no trees and few bushes of any kind. The earth was broken into ridges of rock and rubble. The setting sun threw black shadows across the black ground.

“What happened?” asked Sophos.

“It is the dystopia,” said the magus. “We’ll stop here for the night.” He explained as Pol cooked dinner that the dystopia was the remains of the boiling rock that had poured out of the Sacred Mountain thousands of years before. The ground was rich with minerals, but it was too hard to allow plants to take root. It was difficult to cross and impossible to build a road through. It was as empty as any piece of land in the entire world.

“There is of course a myth to explain it,” the magus said, yawning and rubbing his hands through his hair, “but I am too tired now even to listen to Gen tell it. So I will just say that Eugenides tried to use the thunderbolts he’d stolen from the Sky and started the fire that burned all this ground.”

“He killed his brother,” I said from where I was already lying on my blankets.

“Hmm? What was that, Gen?”

“His parents—not the Goddess, his mortal mother and father—had finally had children, and Eugenides killed his brother by accident in the fire. That’s when
Hamiathes saved him, and when Hephestia gave Hamiathes his gift to reward him because she was fond of her brother.”

“So now we know everything,” Ambiades said sourly from his blankets, and we all went to sleep without another word.

I had a strange dream that night of a marble-walled room and a woman in white, and I woke just as the moon was setting behind the olive trees. I had trouble getting back to sleep, so I sat up. Pol was on watch. If it had been the magus, he would have told me to lie down again. Sophos would have wanted to talk, but Pol just looked at me across the embers of the fire without a word. I stood up and paced a little back and forth, practicing my stretching exercises to loosen the muscles in my back. There were a few sore spots left from the magus’s beating, but it was the pain in my wrists that bothered me. I cursed Ambiades under my breath and crossed over the fire to squat down near Pol.

“Those berries you gave me…”

“The ossil?”

“Do you have any more?”

He turned to his pack and pulled a small relief kit from it. Inside was a leather sack which held the berries. He poured out a small handful into his palm and then transferred them to my open hand.

“Only two at a time,” he reminded me.

“Be blessed in your endeavors,” I thanked him automatically, and popped the berries into my mouth before lying back down. I continued to flex my hands in training exercises until I was asleep.

The magus took fate in his hands the next morning and left Ambiades, Sophos, and me alone with one another again. He thought he had glimpsed a fire between the trees in the night, and he wanted to be sure we were unobserved when we crossed the dystopia. He and Pol went to scout. Before they left, Pol handed Ambiades and Sophos their wooden swords and told them to practice and do nothing else. Ambiades pretended not to understand, but Sophos nodded his head earnestly. They were both stretching out their muscles as Pol and the magus disappeared from sight.

As soon as they were gone, Ambiades turned to Sophos and poked him in the ribs with his sword. “Up and at ’em,” he said.

“I haven’t finished the stretching exercises,” Sophos protested.

“Oh, forget them,” said Ambiades. “You’ll warm up as we go.”

So Sophos put his sword into guard position, and they began circling each other. I watched them from where I lay with my head propped against a saddle. Ambiades struck over the top of Sophos’s guard, but Sophos remembered his lesson and stepped to one side
to block. He forgot, however, to follow through with a thrust after his block, and by the time he remembered, the opening in Ambiades’s guard was closed.

“Good block,” said Ambiades, trying to hide his surprise, and swung again. Sophos blocked, but he underestimated the force of the blow and had to back up to regain his balance. While he retreated, Ambiades pushed in and whacked him on the ribs. Sophos brought an elbow down to cover too late, as if an arm would have stopped anything but a wooden sword. Ambiades managed to whack it as he pulled his sword back. Sophos yelped, but Ambiades pretended not to hear, looking superior.

He rushed Sophos again and in the guise of fencing practice began to give him a series of bruises he wouldn’t forget for a month. I was reduced to calling advice.

“Look,” I said as they disengaged, “every time he tries to ride over the top of your guard, he leaves his right side open. Step left to block his attack and then counter immediately to his rib cage.” I wasn’t as patient as Pol. I couldn’t wait for him to figure this out on his own.

“I’m sorry,” said Sophos humbly. He was standing with his shoulders slumped, rubbing a sore elbow. He’d dropped his sword onto the dirt. “I’m just not fast enough. You’re a better swordsman, Ambiades.”

Ambiades shrugged as if to say, “Of course,” and Sophos blushed. I snorted.

“All it shows,” I said, “is that Ambiades is six inches taller than you and has a longer sword, as well as a longer sword arm.”

The smug look gone, Ambiades turned on me. “What do you know about sword fighting, Gen?”

“I know your guard is terrible. I know that any opponent your size would cut you to pieces.”

“Do you mean yourself?”

“I’m not your size.”

“Coward.”

“Not at all. If I got up and beat on you, Pol would come back and beat on me. I have work to do, and I don’t like to work with bruises.”

“Pol wouldn’t know.”

“Of course not.”

Ambiades came to stand over me. “You’re just a coward making excuses.”

He kicked me in the side. It wasn’t a heavy kick. But it was hard enough to leave a bruise in muscles that I might be needing at any moment.

“Ambiades, you can’t.” Sophos looked horrified.

“Do that again and I tell the magus,” I said.

He leaned over me, his face ugly in contempt. “Gutter scum can’t fight its own battles,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Gutter scum gets drafted into the infantry and fights for a worthless king, and hangers-on like you watch.”

“Gen,” Sophos protested, “that’s treasonous.”

“Do I care?” I said.

“Surprised, Sophos?” Ambiades’s contempt made Sophos writhe. “His kind only ever serve themselves.”

“Oh? And who else are
you
serving?” I asked him.

It had been a casual dig, but it hit a target. Ambiades’s face twisted, and he swung his foot back, and that time he would have broken my ribs if I hadn’t rolled away. When he lifted his foot to kick me again, I grabbed him by the heel and pulled him off-balance, then twisted in the dust to hook one foot behind his locked knee. He went down. I was almost to my feet and crouched to jump when the magus and Pol reappeared.

The magus raised his eyebrows. We separated. Ambiades got up and began brushing the dust off his sword. I lay back down with my head on the saddle.

“No unpleasantness, I trust?” said the magus. No one answered him.

After a very quiet discussion between the magus and Pol, we left the horses with Ambiades. The magus had wanted to leave Sophos with the horses, but Pol wouldn’t let him stay by himself and he wouldn’t leave him with Ambiades either. It was clear that things had gone from bad to worse between Sophos and his idol.

So the magus, Pol, Sophos, and I headed into the dystopia on foot. I was more than glad to leave Ambiades behind. We walked all day, following the
magus, who followed the directions of his compass. There was no trail at all, and we picked our way between and over the rumpled slabs of porous black rock. We carried our own water. There was none flowing in the dystopia, but there must have been some in the ground because grasses grew in clumps and bushes in larger clusters. Everything had dried to sticks and prickles that caught on our clothes as we passed. The rocks’ rough surface tore cloth and rubbed raw skin that slid across it.

The magus explained to Sophos that more water moving across the lava could break it down into rich soil, but that this area was higher than the Sea of Olives and only had one river, the Aracthus.

“The Aracthus has carved itself a canyon and doesn’t cause much erosion outside it. Later it reaches the plains below this and dumps what minerals it has collected there. That land is some of the best farming property in all Attolia.”

“What about the Sea of Olives?” Sophos asked.

“It’s a watershed for the winter rains that fall on the dystopia. Once the rains stop, most of the creeks empty and the land won’t support crops. That’s why it was all planted to olives before it was abandoned.”

Crossing the dystopia, I again felt like a bug caught out in the open. My upbringing was making itself felt, and I longed to have more of the sky shut out. The mountains did rise in sheer cliffs on my left, but their steepness shut me out instead of enclosing me. I’d been
more comfortable in the Sea of Olives.