“But where are we going?”
“Would you shut up?”
My left hand, the bad one, brushed along the wall until it bumped against a door handle. The pain stopped me in my tracks, and I squeezed Sophos’s hand hard to prevent him from bumping me. “Hold on,” I whispered. They stood quietly while I worked the lock on the door. Fortunately I had a key that fit closely enough and could turn it with one hand. “Watch the door,” I said as I pulled it open. It rumbled, but the hinges didn’t squeak. “Don’t bang your head,” I warned the magus.
We walked down a tunnel only as wide as the door. The walls arched into the ceiling just a few inches over my head. There was a stone door at the end that had a simple crossbar fastening on the inside. Once through it, we were outside the castle on a narrow footing of stone that ran under its walls. In the silence we could hear waves lapping against the stone under our feet, and in the river there were ghosts of reflections from torches set in sconces along the sentry walk above our heads.
“What is this?” Sophos asked.
“It’s the Seperchia,” said the magus. “Remember this stronghold sits in the middle of the river and defends the bridge to either side.”
“I meant, what is this?” Sophos said, and stamped his foot on the stone under him.
“This is a ledge that runs around the entire castle,” I explained, “so that they can maintain the foundation. We’re going to follow it to the bridge into town. Keep your voices down. There are guards.”
“Why is there a door?”
I left it to the magus to answer.
“They dispose of bodies by throwing them in the river.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes the guards will sell a body back to the family if they wait here in a boat,” he said.
Sophos finally kept his mouth shut as we crabbed our way around the castle. There was no moon. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, so I kept it on the castle wall and checked with my forward foot to make sure there was always ground underneath me. The magus put himself between me and Sophos, and he was careful not to bump. We crept around one corner, and then another. There were no torches burning on the bridge, and if there were guards watching, they were posted on the towers, not on the bridge itself. The three of us snuck across.
Getting through town proved to be trickier than leaving the castle. Without the moon we had to pick our way carefully, and I had a difficult time leading the way I wanted to go. The fires in the houses had been banked hours ago, and there was no glow through the windows to help us. Dogs barked as we passed, but no watch came to check on them. The road from the castle led away from the river. We left it, hoping to cut back to the water, and got lost in narrow streets. Twice I almost walked headlong into the invisible walls of houses before we finally came to another road that ran along the riverbank and passed a bridge.
“We stay on this side,” I said, and the magus didn’t argue. We moved very slowly past dark houses. I was happier without moonlight because I didn’t have to worry about hiding, and going slowly, I had time as I took each step to favor my shoulder.
“Gen,” the magus asked, “how are you?”
“Good enough.” I answered, a little surprised at how capable I was feeling. I was weak but clearheaded. My shoulder hurt, but in a distant way. The pain was only sharp when I stumbled, and I didn’t stumble often. I felt as if I were floating very gently down the road, buoyed by an invisible cloud. The night all around was filled with the usual noise of bugs and jumping fish and distant dogs howling, but there seemed to be a bubble of silence that surrounded us.
The moon eventually came up, and the going was easier, but the magus didn’t try to hurry me. He and Sophos were both patient, but Sophos kept wanting to chatter as we walked. I realized that he was frightened and that talking helped him, but I needed to concentrate all my energy on my feet. The magus talked with him. We kept moving until just before dawn.
We weren’t many miles from town, but the road we followed ran up against a rise and turned inland. In order to stay with the river, we needed to follow a narrower path that climbed through the rocks along the bank. We stopped to rest. I leaned against a convenient stone pile and slid to the ground. I tucked Sophos’s overshirt, which was fortunately a long one, underneath me and closed my eyes. My feet were cold. I ignored them and slept for a while. When I opened my eyes again, there was enough light to see the color of the world. The magus’s overshirt was wrapped around my feet, and the magus was gone.
I jerked my head around to look for him, and wished I hadn’t. My body had stiffened while I slept. Sophos was still asleep beside me, curled up on the ground. The magus was standing a little way away, looking down through the rocks at the river. I called him, and when he turned to look at me, his face was bleak. Little birds began to peck in my stomach.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“The river is running the wrong way.”
Let the gods into your life and you rapidly lose faith in the natural laws. The little birds stopped pecking, and they all fell over dead. I had a stomach full of dead birds for a moment as I thought that he meant the river had truly reversed its direction. He only meant that he had been mistaken during the night about which way it was flowing.
The magus sat down and put his head in his hands. “I lost my sense of direction in the town,” he said. “We haven’t been following the river downstream toward the pass. We’ve been going upstream. The ground was rising gradually, but I didn’t notice until we reached this steeper part. I have no idea where we are.”
Sophos sat up blinking just then, so no one noticed my sigh of relief. “What’s the matter?” he asked, looking at the magus, who explained. All he knew was that we were on the far side of the dystopia from the Sea of Olives. That was why the road we were following had turned. Upriver there was no more arable land. There was no way of knowing how far the track we were on might lead us up the river. The ground would rise and get rockier and more difficult to cover. As far as the magus knew, there might be no bridges at all before the dystopia ran into the foot of the mountains, where we would be trapped.
“There’s a trade route on the far side of the river, and I’m sure there are some villages, but I don’t know why any of them would want a bridge to the dystopia.”
“What about this road we’ve been on?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“It’s been getting narrower,” the magus said, “and beyond here it turns into a track and probably dead-ends at the next farm. I went to look.”
“So what do we do?” Sophos asked the magus.
“We keep going,” I said. “We can’t go back without running into a search party.” I rested my head against the stone for another moment. “We’ll stick to the river and hope that there are enough rocks to slow down any horses. There’s no reason for us to have gone this way, and they’ll probably concentrate their searching in the other direction.”
“We could hide in the dystopia for a while,” suggested Sophos. “We could cross it and go back through the Sea of Olives.”
The magus looked sideways at me. “We couldn’t get across the Aracthus.”
“We could wait until Gen is better.”
“What about food?”
Not being at all hungry, I had forgotten about food. “At least we have plenty of water,” I said optimistically, and started to get up. I felt like one of the damaged clocks that my brother sometimes worked on. The magus bent down to give me a hand. Sophos turned to help as well.
“Do you really think that they’ll search for us? Won’t beheading us start a war?” he asked.
I considered the prestige value of cutting the head off one of your enemy’s premier advisors and compared it to the drawbacks of an all-out war. “She might let you two go”—I nodded—“to avoid a war or to delay one until she’s ready.”
“What about you?” Sophos asked.
“She might let me go as well. But she’d probably like be
st to catch me and let you two slip away.” No one was going to start a war over me, and I could be tremendously useful if I could be induced to work for her. I shivered, and something that wanted to be a groan came out of my mouth as a sigh. We had to stay close to the river because if we were going to be caught, I planned to throw myself in.
Once I was on my feet, momentum carried me forward. We followed a goat track that ran across the rocks right beside the river. The crumbled stones on the path rubbed the skin off the bottom of my feet, but I could see better, and we moved a little faster than before.
As we walked, mostly single file, Sophos continued to talk. “Gen?” he asked. “If you could be anywhere you wanted right now, where would it be?”
I sighed. “In bed,” I said. “In a big bed, with a carved footboard, in a warm room with a lot of windows. And sheets,” I added after I’d taken a few more steps, thinking of them rubbing against my sore feet, “as nice as the ones they sell on the Sacred Way. And a fireplace,” I added, expanding the daydream. “And books.”
“Books?” he asked, surprised.
“Books,” I said firmly, not caring if the magus thought it was odd. “Lots of books. Where would you be?”
“Under the apricot tree in my mother’s garden at the villa. I’d be watching my little sisters play, and anytime I wanted one, I’d reach up and pick another apricot.”
“They aren’t ripe this time of year.”
“Well, say you can be any place any time you like. Where would you be, magus?”
The magus was quiet so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“I’d be in the main temple,” he said at last.
“Urgh,” I said, still associating the temple with boredom—a lot of people chanting and incense everywhere. My new, vehement belief in the gods had made me no more tolerant of the empty mumbling I’d seen in temples all my life.
The magus wasn’t finished. “Watching the marriage of Sounis and Eddis.”
I made a face. “Why are you so keen on this marriage?”
“The king needs an heir, and that heir needs to inherit Eddis as well as Sounis.”
“He does have a nephew,” Sophos pointed out.
“I’m sorry, of course he has an heir,” said the magus. “But he needs a son of his own for the throne to be secure. Which means he needs to have a wife.”
“And why should his heir be entitled to Eddis?” I asked.
He thought I deserved a complete answer, which shows more than anything how much his opinion of me had changed. “Entitled not just to Eddis but to Attolia as well,” he said. “You would have no way of knowing, Gen, but these three countries are free only by a rare combination of circumstances. The earliest invaders overran our country because they wanted us to pay them tribute. They were slowly replaced by the Merchant Empire, which mostly wanted our trade, and those overlords we eventually drove away. We could do that only because the Merchant Empire was busy fighting a greater threat elsewhere, the Medes. The Medes have been trying for a hundred years to expand their empire to span the middle sea. Soon they will want not only our land but to drive us off of it. For years and years they have fought what remains of the Merchant Empire, and while they fight, we are free. But when they are done fighting, Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia must be united to fight the winner or we will be subjugated as we never were before. There will be no Sounis, no Attolia, no Eddis, only Mede.”
“You’re sure the Medes will win?”
“I’m sure.”
It was something to think about while we trudged along. We were rising above the river; the bank grew steeper until it was dropping straight down six or eight feet into the water. We walked on a narrow trail of dirt packed on top of stones. To the left of the trail the stones were piled even higher. The river was narrower and deeper the further we went upstream. I could hear it churning as it forced its way through its narrow channel. The opposite bank was only a few hundred yards away, and once we passed a tiny, empty village. There were no trees, and the sun grew hotter. On our left the stones rose higher, cutting off our line of sight at every twist in the path.
When we came to another rise in the path, the magus helped Sophos climb onto a rock to look downriver.
“Do you see anyone?” we both asked him.
He said no and began to scramble down.
“Wait,” I said. “Do you see any dust?”
“You mean, in the air? Yes, there’s a cloud.”
“That’s horses on the road,” I said to the magus.
He agreed as he helped Sophos down. We tried to hurry, but while I wasn’t in much pain, I didn’t have the strength to move any faster. The next time Sophos looked he could see a glimpse of the horses as they came single file between the rocks. We walked on, until I caught my foot on a stone and stumbled forward. The magus was ahead of me. He heard me catch my breath and turned to help, but by that time I’d hit the ground. He tried to help me up but reached for the wrong shoulder. I could only flutter a hand in distress. My grandfather would have been proud of his training. A thief never makes a noise by accident. I bit my lip.
“Gen? Gen, don’t faint. We’ll leave the path and try to hide somewhere in the rocks. They may go past.”
“No,” I said. That was a hopeless plan, and we both knew it. If he and Sophos left me, they might get away, but there was a better alternative. Between breaths, I said, “There’s a bridge.” Upriver, islands of rock divided the flow of water. Debris had been swept down the river when it was in flood and had lodged against the rocks. One tree trunk stretched from our bank to a pile of rock in the center of the river.
The magus looked over his shoulder and saw the makeshift bridge. “Do you think we can get across?”
“Yes.” There was a second collection of branches that crossed to the far bank. It was more fragile, but it would bear my weight and probably the magus’s.
The bridge, such as it was, was still several hundred yards away. The horsemen were only twice that distance behind us. It was a race between the tortoise and the hare, but the tortoise had just enough head start, and he had the magus to drag him along. We reached the makeshift crossing with the pursuers just behind. They’d left their horses. They couldn’t manage the many pitfalls in the trail, and the men moved faster on foot.
“Sophos, you go first,” said the magus. “Then I’ll help Gen across.”
“No,” I said.
“Should I try to walk?” asked Sophos.
“No!” I insisted that he get on his hands and knees and creep across. One slip and he would be sucked into the river and probably never seen again. A river runs fastest at its narrowest point, and all of the water of the Seperchia had to squeeze between these banks. It was deceptively smooth, but it had the strength to drag a man under in a heartbeat. Sophos safely crawled to the island in the center of the river.
“We’ll go together, Gen,” the magus said.
“No.”
“Gen, I won’t leave you again.”
He looked over my shoulder at the men coming behind and tried to pull my good hand. By then I think he was fairly sure that the guards would let him and Sophos slip away. “Gen—”
“You have to tell Sophos that if the branches on the second bridge sag underneath him, he has to jump to the riverbank. If he tries to cross with his feet in the water, he’ll drown.”
The magus checked on Sophos, who was beginning to cross the second, more fragile bridge. It was made of small tree branches bundled together by the water and held in place where those branches had caught in crevices between the rocks. The wood was brittle, and as branches broke, the bridge dropped closer to the water. The magus knew Archimedes’s principle as well as I did.
“Gen?” He turned back to me.
“I can manage. I promise,” I told him.
Reluctantly he went. He crawled as carefully as Sophos.
Once he reached the island, I slithered down the bank to where the tree trunk was lodged and walked across.
The wood had been washed smooth by the water and was a comfort to my bare feet. If it had been half as wide, I would have had no trouble.
The magus grinned as I landed on the rocks beside him and I turned to give him what help I could dislodging the bridge. There was a man starting to cross, but he jumped back to safety before the log came free. The current sucked it away. Over the drumming of water we could hear cursing.
I sent the magus across the second bridge. He went without protest; then I started across. Many of the small branches that held the bridge in place had broken under the magus’s weight, and it sagged dangerously near the water. If it dropped any lower, it would be swept away by the current, but the branches that had held the magus’s weight held mine as well. Halfway across, I saw the length of rope, twisted in the branches. I crept through the tangle of branches onto the rocks beside the magus, just as the men behind me began firing their handheld guns. I wasn’t very worried. The new guns will stop an infantry charge, but they can’t be aimed well enough to allow the rifleman to pick his target. Crossbows would have been much more dangerous, but the queen of Attolia liked to have her personal guard carry the rifles because she thought they were more impressive.
I pointed out the rope to the magus and asked if he could reach it. I had to shout above the sound of the river.
“They might be able to find another tree trunk on their bank. It would be better to get rid of both bridges.”
The magus nodded his head and grabbed on to a rock as he swung out over the river. He picked free a strand of the frayed rope and pulled on it. It broke in his hand. The men on the opposite bank fired again. The magus moved more slowly and picked three or four of the rope ends out of the tangle of the branches before he pulled. This time they held, and the whole bridge twitched and bent. The brittle branches broke off, the bridge shortened a few inches, and the far end dropped into the water. The current swept everything away.