“I didn’t have any godsdamned breakfast!” I snarled, and he backed away. Evidently my anger was still effective. He wasn’t going to bring up the reason I’d missed the morning meal.
After we had eaten the bread and the slippery cheese and were chewing on the dried pieces of jerky, Sophos said mournfully, “I’m still hungry.”
I crossed my arms without saying anything. That was their tough luck.
“We could get some fish out of the river,” Ambiades pointed out. “Pol has fishing line and hooks in his pack.”
Sophos looked over at me.
“Don’t expect my help,” I said.
“We don’t ever expect you to be helpful, Gen, but I’ll bet you’ll want some of the fish if we catch it,” said Ambiades.
“I could fish and you could watch him,” suggested Sophos. I saw that Sophos had also placed me in the category of unreliable livestock.
“You’re terrible at fishing. You jerk the line and lose the bait.”
“I could watch him while you fished.”
Ambiades snorted. “If he got up and walked away, you wouldn’t stop him. No. What we’ll do is tie him up.”
“You will not,” I said.
“How?” Sophos ignored me.
“There’s rope in the magus’s pack. Go get it.” Sophos went while I continued to protest.
“You’re not tying me up. The magus said to keep an eye on me. He didn’t say go fishing.”
“Shut up,” said Ambiades. “It’s your fault there’s nothing to eat.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not going to tie me up.”
I’d been sitting cross-legged on the ground. When Ambiades leaned over me with the rope, I rolled away. He dropped on top of me, across my sore shoulders, and I yelped. He slipped a loop of rope over one of my hands and back, pulling the loop tight over the new pink skin on my wrist where the sores had almost healed.
“Don’t.” I yelped again. I grabbed the rope to keep it from pulling any tighter and tried to slip the loop off, but the rough rope dug into the tender skin. Ambiades yanked on the rope, pulling it out of my hand and tightening the loop.
“Hold still, or I’ll pull it tighter,” he said, and I gave up. I sat still while they tied my wrists and my ankles together, complaining the entire time.
“Be sure and make it tight,” Ambiades told Sophos, who was working on my ankles.
“It’s too tight,” I said. “You’re tying my hands too tight.”
“Shut up,” said Ambiades.
“Are you sure it’s not too tight?” Sophos asked.
“Of course I’m sure. Have you got his feet done?”
“Ambiades”—I made one last effort to convince him—“you’ve tied my hands too tight. I can’t feel my fingers. You have to loosen them.”
“Maybe you should, Ambiades.”
“Don’t be stupid, Sophos, he’s just saying that. Look, his hands are fine.”
“They are not! Look.” I held them up to Sophos. The pink skin on either side of the ropes was already puffy, but he was looking at my fingers.
“They aren’t blue.”
“They will be soon.”
“They will not. Come on, Sophos.” Ambiades had collected the fishing gear out of the magus’s pack, and he pulled Sophos away.
I wanted to shout for them to come back, but I was afraid that that close to an Attolian town, someone else might hear me. One curious villager could get us locked in a cellar until a queen’s guardsman came to interrogate us. I didn’t want to be publicly beheaded, and the ropes were not so tight that I couldn’t stand them for a little while. I kept thinking that at any moment the magus or the Uselesses would be back. I sat and watched my hands turn blue.
Ambiades and Sophos didn’t return from the river until they had seen Pol making his way down the riverbank. They found me lying on my side, breathing quietly and trying by mental effort to force the blood past the constricting knots and out of my hands, which were swollen and mottled.
“Oh, no,” said Sophos.
“Damn right,” I hissed, “get the ropes off. Be careful!” Ambiades had started tugging at the knots, and the pain was shocking. He jerked on the ropes and pulled the knots even tighter.
“Stop, stop,” I said. “Just leave them. You can cut them off.” But he wasn’t listening. He managed to loosen one loop of rope, and he squeezed it over my fist, scraping the skin off my knuckles. “You’re killing me!” I was reduced to yelling as Pol rushed into the clearing. He pulled Ambiades away and looked down at my hands and then at the fish lying in the dust, forgotten.
“Go get some more fish, both of you.”
After a couple of uncertain steps backward, both Sophos and Ambiades turned and hurried into the bushes by the river. When they were gone, Pol set about carefully removing the knotted ropes. I didn’t bother to whimper suggestively. I lay quietly while he cut the ropes away and only hissed when he pulled them away from the skin where they were stuck.
He started to straighten my curled fingers. “Don’t,” I said.
“They’ve got to be flexed. The blood has pooled.”
“I’ll do it,” I promised, “myself.”
After a moment he nodded.
“Where’s the magus?” I asked.
“He sent me ahead with some of the food. It’s a good thing.” Pol looked over his shoulder to the river. “He doesn’t need to know about this.”
“Oh, yes, he does,” I said. By that time I wanted to see Ambiades flayed alive.
“No,” said Pol, “he doesn’t.” He crouched down a little more so that he could look into my eyes. “The magus has staked his reputation and his life to find this silly stone, wherever it is, and he’ll murder the person who prevents him from getting it. And that person is not”—he shook his finger in front of my face—“going to be Sophos.” I could see that there was no way to get Ambiades punished without dragging Sophos into trouble as well.
“His father sent me to make sure he’s safe and that he learns something on this trip, but he is not going to learn what happens when you ruin the plans of a man like the magus.” It was more words spoken altogether than I’d heard Pol use yet. He wrapped one hand in the fabric of my shirt and pulled my face closer to his. “My orders are to keep him safe and out of trouble. Whether we succeed in retrieving something from a fairy tale is not important to me. Do you understand?”
I nodded my head vigorously and then shook it back and forth. Yes, I understood, and no, the magus didn’t need to be told after all. After all, when I thought about it, I had no grievance against Sophos, and Ambiades’s hash I could settle on my own.
Pol went over to his pack to pull out the relief kit and brought back some bandages and salve to rub on my sore hands and a little paper packet of dried berries.
“Chew two of these,” he said, “They’ll help with the pain. We’ll tell the magus that one of the sores reinfected.”
“How long have I got, Pol?”
“Till what?”
“Till we get to where we are going.”
“How would I know?”
“You know how much food the magus bought.”
He thought for a moment. “Two more days.”
The magus came back with the rest of the food and accepted Pol’s story about my wrists without question. He only seemed concerned that the hands would be functional, and Pol reassured him. Ambiades looked scornful, but Sophos was visibly relieved. When we rode back into the olive groves, he moved his horse alongside mine and apologized very prettily. I told him to shut up and watched him blush. I don’t know what had passed between him and Ambiades down at the river, but Ambiades seemed to have fallen quite off his pedestal. I thought he would probably climb back up again, but not soon. Meanwhile, Ambiades kept his horse near the magus, and Sophos fell back to ride beside Pol or sometimes beside me. I asked him why he had such a fancy cloak, and he blushed again. He was as regular as clockwork.
“My mother bought it for m
e when she heard I’d be traveling to the city to be with a new tutor.”
“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.
r /> 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.