The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner (6)

IN THE MORNING WE ATE the last of the food and drank the last of the water that the others had carried in leather sacks over the mountain. The bread was stale and rock hard, and I wasn’t the only one who was hungry when we were through. The magus saw me looking in distaste at the lump of bread in my hand, and he laughed. He was in a cheery mood and seemed willing to set aside our differences since he’d put me thoroughly in my place.

“I know,” he said. “Don’t bother to complain. I’ll get you fresh bread for lunch, I promise.”

“How long until lunch?”

He turned to look at the trail ahead of us. It dropped steeply and gave us a view of the valley ahead of us. It was a more limited view than the one we had had higher up the mountain. The river had disappeared. So had the sea. “Can you see that break in the olives?” the magus asked. I looked where he pointed and saw the rooftops of a few houses, only three or four miles away. “We’ll get our lunch from there.”

“Then I will leave the rest of my breakfast for the birds.” I pitched the bread over the rocks around our campsite. Everyone but Pol did the same. As a soldier he had probably eaten worse things.

Soon we were once again in the open. The shallow groove carved by the stream ended at the top of a cliff that was the precipitous edge of the mountain. Sixty feet below whispered waves of olives. Between the cliff and the trees, like the foam left by breaking waves, were jumbled rocks of all sizes. To my left and to my right, the cliff, the trees, and the swirling rocks continued as far as I could see. Ahead, the olives rolled out for miles, rising a little but mostly falling away toward the hidden river, their silver surface broken by islands of shiny green, which were the dry oaks, and by lightning catchers that were lone cypress trees standing like swords on their hilts. The rooftops of the town that the magus had pointed out earlier were the only man-made things to break the surface of the trees.

“It’s like a sea,” Sophos said, echoing my thoughts.

“It is a sea,” said the magus quietly. “It’s called the Sea of Olives. It was planted to honor one of the old gods so long ago that no one knows which one. The trees stretch from the coast all the way to the edge of the dystopia, about thirty-five miles inland.”

Ambiades was interested in more practical knowledge. “How do we get down?”

I looked around for the goat path that I knew must be around, and I whistled when I found it. “Glad we had a good night’s rest,” I said. “Everybody did get plenty of sleep, didn’t they?” Nobody mentioned standing a three-hour watch.

“Well, dithering won’t help,” I said.

The path began in a crevasse left behind when a large rock had broken loose from the bluff and dropped to the ground below. There was a shelf about eight feet below the top of the cliff. I flexed my knees and jumped before the magus could stop me. Pol jumped after me and landed so close that he nearly knocked both of us down the slope. I steadied him and called up to Sophos.

“Come on, you’re next. Lie down and slide your legs over the lip.” Pol and I grabbed him by the legs and lowered him. Once he was down with us, the hollow was filled with bodies. I started the next phase of the descent and left Pol to help the magus and Ambiades.

There was no loose rubble to kick down, or I wouldn’t have gone first, but I did worry that one of the others was going to slide down on my head. I went as fast as I safely could.

The path switched back and forth across the cliff, turning every ten feet or so and dropping five feet with each turn. It was only about six inches wide, less in spots, and was more a groove carved into the stone cliff than anything else. There were two bits so steep that I sat down and slithered, grabbing a passing plant to slow down. As I went down, I muttered under my breath, mimicking the magus’s voice. “‘ This trail isn’t used much,’ he says. ‘There are better ones.’ I’ll bet there are,” I said, and swore out loud as my foot slipped. I recovered my balance easily but banged my wrist against an outcropping and swore again.

I sucked on the sore spot as I skittered down the last part of the path and picked my way through the rubble at the bottom. The boulders there were huge, higher than my head, and rested on mounds of smaller rocks that they had dragged down with them when they pulled loose from the cliff face. Once I reached the open space beyond the rocks, I waited for the others. They were slow.

All four of them crabbed along the cliff, holding on with both hands. Even nearly empty, the packs they carried threatened to overbalance everyone but Pol. He and the magus kept stopping to look over their shoulders at me. I looked over my own shoulder and almost went to sit in the shade of the olive trees, but the magus had been more civil than usual, and I wanted to keep him in a good mood. So I waited in the sunlight where he could see me. It was a hot day already, and the sweat trickled down the side of my face.

When everyone else had made it safely down, we moved into the shade and sat down to rest. It was dark under the olives, and cool. The trees were so old and twisted and their leaves grew so thickly that they allowed very little light to reach the ground. Instead of juniper and sage growing underneath them, there was almost nothing, some thin grass, a very few spindly bushes.

“I am going to walk into town to buy horses and lunch,” said the magus as he stood up and dusted himself off. “It will take me almost an hour to walk there and back, in addition to the time it takes to buy the horses and provisions. We’re still a day behind schedule, so we’ll have to eat while we go.” He disappeared between the olive trees.

Pol turned where he sat and opened the pack he’d been leaning against. “No need to waste the time we have,” he said, and pulled two wooden swords out of the pockets sewn to the outside. He handed one to Sophos and one to Ambiades, and they began their fencing lesson. I remembered the scene that I had watched from the window of the mountain hut, and I supposed that it had not been a dream after all.

“Swords up,” said Pol, and they began drills with which they were obviously familiar. Once they had bent and twisted for a while and their muscles were prepared, Pol matched Ambiades and Sophos against each other. They sparred carefully, and I watched with interest. Ambiades was by far the better swordsman, but then he was four or five years older. Sophos was just learning the motions, but he showed some talent and coordination. With a good instructor, he’d be a dangerous opponent. For now he was too short and too unfamiliar with his weapon to do anything except wave it around and hope it connected. At critical moments he occasionally closed his eyes. When Ambiades leaned in over his guard and whacked him on the head, I winced.

“Are you all right?” Ambiades dropped his sword, looking concerned. “I thought that you would block that.” He put his hand up to rub Sophos’s head, but Pol pushed him back.

“He should have. Try it again.” He made Ambiades repeat the move over and over until Sophos worked out for himself a block that would come naturally. Sophos got banged twice more on the head, although Ambiades only hit him lightly. He apologized each time, and I began to think that under the pride and prickles there might be a reason to like him. Finally, when Ambiades rode over the top of Sophos’s guard for the seventh or eighth time, Sophos stepped to one side and blocked the attack from there.

“Good enough,” said Pol, high praise indeed, and ended the lesson. Sophos and Ambiades threw themselves down in the grass, panting while Pol put their wooden swords away. I checked to see that there were pockets sewn to each of their packs, and the magus’s as well. It explained why they hadn’t taken the packs off and tossed them down the cliff before climbing down themselves. Nobody wants his valuable short sword dropped onto a pile of rocks. I was reassured to know that we hadn’t come into the wilderness armed only with Pol’s sword, but I wondered what the Uselesses, elder and younger, would do with theirs if we ever got into a fight. I also wondered if hidden in Pol’s pack or the magus’s was a gun. Acting on the king’s business, they were entitled to carry one, at least in Sounis. Guns weren’t as accurate as crossbows, but they were less awkward to transport, and to have one would have been a comfort.

When the swords were back in their packs, Pol settled down on the grass himself and looked expectantly at Sophos.

“Don’t match your weakness against your opponent’s strength?” Sophos said hesitantly.

“And your weakness is?”

“My height?”

“And Ambiades’s strength is?”

“Years of fencing lessons,” I said under my breath, but no one heard me.

Sophos gave the correct answer. “His height.”

“Remember that.”

Then he praised Ambiades mildly and offered him a few tips. He and Ambiades talked like men for a few minutes about sword fighting. Pol clearly respected the things Ambiades had to say, and Ambiades looked pleased and content. I almost liked him myself.

We still had time to wait for the magus, so I lay down on the soft dirt under an olive tree and closed my eyes. When the magus arrived, we were all, except Pol, sleeping. I woke when I heard the horses thumping toward us but didn’t move. It was pleasant to lie and look up at the twisted branches and tightly packed leaves of the olive trees. The dirt under my fingertips was powder soft. There was a breeze that moved the smallest branches, and the tiny bits of sky that showed through were white in the midday heat. Flies buzzed around my head. The only other sound was that of the horses’ hooves getting closer. It didn’t occur to me until the last minute that it might be a stranger and not the magus at all. I nearly jumped out of my skin, but there had been no need to worry.

“Glad to see someone is alert, if a little bit late,” said the magus as he walked between the trees. Ambiades and Sophos scrambled up and took the horses, while the magus talked to Pol.

“I think we’ll ride down to the road and follow it. We won’t reach Profactia until nightfall, and we can cut around it through the trees. There’s a moon tonight, and we should be able to stay on the road until quite late. We’ll make up some of the time we’ve lost.”

Pol nodded and got up. He helped the Uselesses pack the provisions the magus had brought into the saddlebags. Then we all mounted up and rode slowly between the trees while we ate fresh bread and cheese and more olives. We kept having to lean close to our horses’ necks as they walked under branches without caring whether their riders would fit under the branches as well. Donkeys would not have been so tedious. Donkeys, however, would have been left behind once we reached the road.

We moved quickly. I was still hungry but quit eating. It was too much bother to go on holding the horse with one hand while eating with the other. With Pol on one side of me and Ambiades on the other, I bounced up the road until I got used to the feeling. The magus had cautioned Ambiades and Sophos to keep their mouths shut when we were within earshot of other travelers, as their accents would mark them as members of Sounis’s upper class.

“You don’t need to worry, Gen,” he said to me, teasing again.

“Really?”

“Attolian gutter is indistinguishable from Sounisian gutter,” he said, and I laughed with the others. I was very content with my slang and my half-swallowed words.

When we were alone on the road, walking the horses for a while to rest them, Sophos asked what would happen if anyone guessed we were not from Attolia.

“Nothing.” The magus shrugged. “Traders still do business here. Trade would go on right up until there was open war; it might not stop even then.”

“And if they knew why we were here?” I asked.

The magus gave me a sharp look before he answered, “They’d probably arrest us and turn us over to their queen.” I gathered that he wanted to leave the rest unsaid.

“And she would?” I prompted anyway.

“Behead us all. Publicly.”

I shivered and rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. Ambiades looked positively green. He was touchy and unpleasant the rest of the day.

It was twilight and traffic was increasing when we approached Profactia. We dawdled until there was no one in sight on the road and then disappeared into the olive groves, where we waited again until Pol and the magus agreed that all of the olive harvesters would have left the trees for the night. We rode quietly through the trees and saw nothing of the town. I was a little disappointed. We returned to the road without being seen. The moon was up. The night air was cool, and we’d pulled our cloaks out of the saddlebags. We stayed close to the trees like robbers and went on until I was almost worn out. Just as the moon was setting, the magus finally turned his horse into the trees to look for a camping site. We ate our dinner cold and slept without a fire.

Pol woke us before dawn, and the magus led us deeper among the trees, following the guidance of his compass in its brown leather case. After an hour or so, when the sun was beginning to be warm, we stopped for breakfast in a tiny open space where several olive trees had died and not been replaced. Breakfast was just bread and more cheese, but Pol boiled water over a tiny fire and made coffee that was thick with sugar. “That will wake us up,” he said.

There was a small spring nearby, and the magus suggested we have a wash before we packed up. Sophos, the magus, and Pol shucked their clothes and splashed ankle deep into the chilly water. After a few hesitations I joined them. I didn’t want them to think I liked being clean, but the cool water was refreshing. Only Ambiades remained on the bank, still wrapped in his cloak while his small cup of coffee cooled in front of him. He’d been quiet all morning and, I realized, quiet the evening before—no taunts for me and no gibes for Sophos. He wasn’t thinking about a bath in the spring, and I was wondering what unpleasant thoughts were on his mind when he jumped like a startled cat. The magus had flicked cold water on him.

“Come wash,” the magus said, and Ambiades stood up and dropped his cloak beside the others on the stream bank. It lay next to Sophos’s and made a very poor showing. The other cloaks were well made but ordinary. Mine was probably one of the magus’s old ones cut down, and Pol’s was a plain military cloak, but Sophos’s was a particularly fine specimen, made of expensive fabric generously cut with a stylish silk tassel hanging from the hem at the back. Beside it, the narrow cut of Ambiades’s cloak was flashy but out of fashion, and there was a line of holes, poorly darned, that ran from neck to hem, where a moth had been eating it during its summer storage.

As he dabbled his toes in the water, Ambiades looked over at the magus and Sophos, who were already stepping out of the stream, finished with their quick wash. His eyes narrowed, and the hair on the back of my neck started to rise. I’ve seen envy before, and I know the damage it can do. Ambiades caught me staring, and his envy was replaced by righteous contempt. If one thing was perfectly clear to him, it was my worthless place in the universe.

“What are you looking at, sewer filth?” he snarled.

“The Lord of Rags and Tatters,” I said with a false smile as I bowed elaborately and gestured to his ratty cloak.

A moment later I was on my back in the cold water of the stream with the sun in my eyes and my ears ringing. Ambiades stood over me shouting something about his grandfather’s having been the duke of somewhere. He would have kicked me, but Pol was there and put a hand on his shoulder to pull him back. A moment later the magus was standing between me and the sun.

“A little circumspection might be wise for someone in your position, Gen,” he said mildly. “Not to mention an apology.”

Well, my position was not a good one, I was willing to admit, but it was easily changed. I pulled my knees up to my chest and rolled myself onto my feet. “Apologize?” I said to the magus. “What for?” I walked away, nursing my swelling lip and licking the blood from the corner of my mouth. I paused to filch a comb from an open saddle pack and then sat on the stump of a dead olive tree to get the tangles and maybe some of the prison lice out of my hair. Pol packed his coffeepot into a bag, and Ambiades and Sophos put saddles on the horses.

The magus stood watching me. After a moment he opened his mouth to comment, and I expected him to suggest I cut the hair off, but instead he asked sharply, “Where did you get that comb?”

I looked at the comb in my hand as if perplexed. It was a nice one, probably very expensive. It was made from tortoiseshell, and it had long teeth and was inlaid with gold at the ends. “I think it’s Ambiades’s,” I said at last. I’d taken it out of his pack.

Ambiades turned so quickly that the horse he was saddling reared in alarm. He left it pulling at its head tie and crossed the clearing to snatch the comb out of my hand. He swung his fist toward my face, but this time I was ready, and he hit my shoulder as I turned away. Still, he knocked me backward off the stump where I was sitting and I landed in the dirt on the far side. I landed safely, but I yelped that my arm was broken.

For the second time that morning the magus was standing over me, this time looking concerned.

“Did you land on it?” he asked, bending down.

“No, the one he hit,” I said. “He’s broken my arm,” which was a dreadful lie, and when the magus saw that, he stalked away in disgust.

He explained to Ambiades, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that if I’d fallen on my arm, I might very well have sprained a wrist and I would then be no use to him at all. “I thought I’d made that clear to you a moment ago.” He punctuated his next few comments with blows to the head with that seal ring of his while I lay and listened to Ambiades yelp and resented being treated like a tool, even a valued one.

Once he had delivered his lecture, the magus left Ambiades to finish saddling up the horses, and went to repack the soap and his razor into his saddlebag. Several times I saw him look up with a puzzled expression, not at me but at Ambiades. If he thought he’d pounded good nature back into his apprentice, he was wrong. I saw the poisonous looks Ambiades sent back.

When Sophos was done saddling his horse and Pol’s, he loaned me his own comb. I told him to his face that he was much too nice to be a duke. He blushed deep red and shrugged.

“I know,” he said.

“So does his father,” snarled Ambiades, leaning down from his horse as he rode by.

It was not a propitious start to the day. Ambiades sulked for most of the morning, and Sophos rode with his shoulders hunched, trying to ignore the tension in the air. I reached up occasionally to check the size of my lip.

At one point I muttered, “You learn something new every day.”

“What are you learning?” Sophos asked.

“To keep my mouth shut, I hope.”

“You mean not bragging in wineshops that you’re going to steal the king’s seal ring?”

“That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking,” I said, “but you can bet I won’t do that either. Tell me, if Ambiades has an exalted grandfather, why doesn’t he have a better cloak?”

Sophos checked to be sure that Ambiades was riding ahead of the magus and out of earshot. “His grandfather was duke of Eumen.”

I had to think for a minute. “Of the Eumen conspiracy?” I asked. I was quiet myself. Ordinary people didn’t talk out loud about the Eumen conspiracy.

“After he tried to return the oligarchy and was executed, his family forfeited their lands and titles. I think Ambiades’s father did inherit some money, but he lost most of it gambling. Last winter, when Ambiades wrote to his father and told him he needed a new cloak, his father sent him one of his old ones.”

“Ah,” I said. “Poor Ambiades.”

Sophos looked at me sideways.

“How can he look down his aristocratic nose at the unwashed masses when he’s as poor as anyone else, and landless to boot? I bet he wakes up every morning and can’t stand it.”

We stayed away from roads. Although we crossed many dirt tracks, we picked our way carefully between the trees and moved mostly at a slow pace. From time to time the magus checked the compass to make sure we stayed on course.

We stopped early in the evening as no moonlight would penetrate the crisscrossed leaves, but we were far enough from the nearest town that the magus approved a larger cooking fire, and Pol used some of the dried meat in the provisions to make a stew. There was no conversation around the fire as we ate. After dinner the silence was strained. Finally the magus spoke. “If Gen can take a few liberties with the old myths, I suppose I can, too,” he said, and began to tell Sophos another story of the old gods.

“Well done,” I said when the magus finished.

“Why, thank you, Gen.”

Did he sound genuinely flattered?