“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.
In the evening we reached the Aracthus and turned upriver, toward the mountains. I tried to ignore the world stretching out forever behind my back. A few trees grew near the river, as well as bushes, and the lava flow didn’t seem to be so much of a wasteland as it had. The river was narrow but deep in most places and had cut a channel as it twisted and banged against the rocky sides of its bed. Every once in a while it jumped over a shallow waterfall. Sometimes we walked along the edge of a chasm in which the water flowed; sometimes the chasm grew wider and shallower and we walked on the sand beside the river itself.
As the sun was setting, we hiked around a curve and came to a larger falls, maybe two or three times my height. The river was closed in on the side opposite us by bluffs. We could see the striations in the soil, all of them red or black. On our side the riverbank was almost flat, the lava had been ground into a beach, and behind us rose a more gradual hill that cut off the view of the dystopia between us and the Olive Sea.
The magus stopped. “This is it,” he said.
“This is what?” I asked.
“This is where you earn your reputation.”
I looked around at the empty rock and river and the sandy soil under my feet. As far as I could see, there was nothing to steal, nothing at all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“WE’LL HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL nearly midnight,” said the magus. “We might as well get something to eat.”
So Pol unpacked the backpacks and made dinner over a fire. It took Sophos some time to find enough fuel to burn, but he managed. I didn’t help. I scuffed a hollow in the sand and lay down in it to rest while I flexed my fingers in limbering exercises and kneaded the wrists as much as I could stand to prevent them from going stiff. I wondered what the magus thought we were up to, out in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t ask. We weren’t on speaking terms. While Pol cooked, I napped.
The dream I’d had the night before returned. I was walking up steps into a small room with marble walls. There were no windows, but moonlight came from somewhere to fall on the white hair and dress of a woman waiting there for me. She was wearing the ancient peplos that fell in pleated folds to her feet, like one of the women carved in stone beside old altars. As I entered the room, she nodded as if she’d been expecting me for some time, as if I were late. I had a feeling I should recognize her, but I didn’t.
“Who brings you here?” she asked.
“I bring myself.”
“Do you come to offer or to take?”
“To take,” I whispered, my mouth dry.
“Take what you seek if you find it then, but be cautious. Do not offend the gods.” She turned to the tall three-legged table beside her. It held an open scroll and she lifted a stylus and wrote, adding my name at the bottom of a long list and placing a small mark beside it. When I woke a moment later, Pol had dinner ready.
We ate by moonlight, without conversation, and then we sat. Nobody said much, and no one but the magus knew what we were waiting for. To break the silence, he at last condescended to ask me to tell him the story of Eugenides and the thunderbolts. He wanted to compare it with the version he knew.
I rubbed my arm across my forehead and yawned. I wasn’t really in a storytelling mood, but neither did I want to sit in gloomy silence until midnight. I abbreviated the story a bit and told it to him.
EUGENIDES AND THE GREAT FIRE
After Eugenides was born, the woodcutter and his wife had other children. The oldest of these children was Lyopidus. He was jealous of Eugenides because Eugenides had the gifts of the gods and because he was older. If the Earth had not given the woodcutter her own baby, Lyo
pidus would have been the first of his father’s children, and he never forgot it. At dinner Eugenides sat on the right hand of their father, and when guests came to the house, it was Eugenides that offered them the wine cup.
When the family’s house was destroyed by the Sky God, Lyopidus was sure that Eugenides would be blamed. It was Eugenides who was the cause of the Sky’s anger. Lyopidus wanted his father and mother to abandon Eugenides in the forest, but they would not. And when Eugenides stole the Sky God’s thunderbolts and became immortal, Lyopidus’s jealousy turned to hatred.
Eugenides knew his brother’s feelings, and to avoid them, he traveled across the world. So Lyopidus sat at his father’s right hand and offered his father’s guests the wine cup, but he was still not happy. When the Sky God came to him in the guise of a charioteer with a plan to humiliate Eugenides, Lyopidus was ready to listen.
The Sky God took Lyopidus into his chariot and ferried him across the middle sea to the house where Eugenides lived, and Lyopidus went and knocked at Eugenides’s door and said, “Here is a stranger who asks to share your wine cup.”
And Eugenides came to his doorway, and he saw Lyopidus and said, “Brother, you are no stranger to me. Why do you ask to share my wine cup as a stranger when you are welcome to all I possess as my kin?”
“Eugenides,” said Lyopidus, “in the past I had bad feelings for you, and now all those bad feelings are gone. That is why I say I am a stranger to you, and as an unfamiliar person I ask to share your wine cup and be your guest, so that you can discover if you like me and if you will call me friend as well as brother.”
Eugenides believed him, so he fetched his wine cup and shared it with Lyopidus and called him his guest. But Lyopidus was no friend and no good guest. He asked his brother many questions, like how he hunted and how well he lived and what luxuries he had. Did he have a Samian mirror? An amber necklace? Gold armlets? An iron cooking pot? And each time Eugenides said no, he did not have that thing, Lyopidus said, “Why, I am surprised. You being a son of Earth.”
And Eugenides said, “The Earth gives me no gifts that she does not give all men. I can hardly ask her to give every man an iron cooking pot in order to have one of my own.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus, “then could you not steal one? As you stole the Sky’s thunderbolts? But no,” he said, setting out his hooks, “I suppose you could not do something so marvelous again.”
“Oh, I could,” said Eugenides, stepping like a mouse into a trap, “if I chose.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus.
And every day Lyopidus tugged on the hooks he had set in Eugenides’s flesh, begging him to perform some marvelous feat. “I could carry the word of it home to our parents,” he explained. “They have not had news of you for so long.”
For a time Eugenides evaded his request, but Lyopidus built up his arrogance, telling him over and over how clever he had been to defeat the Sky God, how much more clever he could be if he put his mind to it. For instance, he could steal the thunderbolts again, just for a lark, and then return them to Hephestia. He knew that Hephestia was fond of her half brother, part human and part god, and would not be angry at the trick.
After a time Eugenides agreed. He knew Hephestia would not mind, and he was eager to impress Lyopidus because he believed that Lyopidus wanted to be his friend as well as his brother. So he climbed one evening into a fir tree that grew in the great valley of the Hephestial Mountains and he waited for Hephestia to pass beneath him as she went to her temple at the summit. As she passed, Eugenides reached down and lifted the thunderbolts from her back, so lightly that she was unaware that they were gone.
He carried them to his house and showed them to Lyopidus, who pretended to be greatly impressed.
“You could throw one,” he said. “If I tried to throw one, it would kill me, but you are part god.”
“I suppose,” said Eugenides.
“Try,” said Lyopidus. “Just a small one.”
And he nagged and cajoled, and to please him, Eugenides agreed to try. He chose one of the smaller thunderbolts, and he threw it against a tree, where it exploded and set the world on fire.
When the world began to burn, the Sky went to his daughter and said, “Where are the thunderbolts that I have loaned to you?”
“Here at my shoulder, Father,” said Hephestia, but the thunderbolts were gone. Hephestia thought perhaps she had dropped them in the valley, so the Sky told her to go there and look and said that he would look with her.
“If you are so careless with them,” he said, “I am not sure that I will return them to you if I find them.”
From the valley Hephestia could not see the fire, and so the world went on burning. The olive trees burned and Eugenides’s house burned. The fire grew, and Lyopidus was afraid. “You are immortal,” he said to his brother, “but I will die.” Eugenides took his hand, and they ran from the flames. The fire surrounded them. Lyopidus cried out in his fear that it had been the Sky that drove him to entrap his brother, and he called on the Sky to protect him, but there was no answer. Eugenides loved his brother, as little as he deserved it, and he tried to carry him safely through the flames, but Lyopidus burned in his arms, while Hephestia and her father walked silently among the fir trees.
Now Hamiathes was king of one of the small mountain valleys. He looked down from his megaron and he saw the world burning and he saw Eugenides and his brother and he could guess the rest. He left his megaron and crossed the river to seek the great goddess in her temple, but her temple was empty. He turned back to the river and met at its bank the river god who was a child of the Sky.
“The world has caught fire,” he told the river.
“I will not burn,” said the river. “I am water.”
“Even water is injured by a great fire,” said Hamiathes, thinking of the burning when the Sky and the Earth were angry with each other.
“Where is the fire?”
“Below us on the plains.”
“Above my course or below it?”
“Below.”
“Then I do not need to worry,” said the river.
“But Eugenides will suffer.”
“Eugenides is the enemy of my father,” said the river, and Hamiathes saw that he would get no offer of help from the river, so he stood for a moment in silence and watched the world burn, and Lyopidus die, and Eugenides burned and did not die.
“Look,” he said to the river, “Eugenides carries the thunderbolts of your father.”
“They are no longer my father’s,” said the sullen river. “Let Hephestia fetch them herself.”
“If you fetched them, you could give them to your father and not to Hephestia,” Hamiathes pointed out.
“Ah,” said the river, and after a moment asked, “Tell me where to change my course that I may fetch the thunderbolts.”
And Hamiathes told him. “If at this point you leave your course and go with all your strength, you will flow across the plain to Eugenides.”
The river did as Hamiathes instructed, and as he flowed across the plain, he cut through the heart of the fire and quenched it, and as he reached Eugenides, his power was almost spent. He swept up the half god along with the thunderbolts because Eugenides would not release them, and the river’s new course carried them both down to the great river, the Seperchia, who was the daughter of the Earth.
She said to the lesser river, “You are tired. Give me the thunderbolts that I may return them to my sister.”
While the smaller river and Seperchia fought for possession of the thunderbolts, Hamiathes went to the temple of the great goddess Hephestia to await her return. And Eugenides, ignored by the two rivers, swam to the bank and pulled himself out of the water, burnt as black as toast. And that is why Eugenides, alone among the gods, is dark-skinned like the Nimbians on the far side of the middle sea.
It was not my favorite story, and I wished I hadn’t brought it to mind just then, when I had work to do.
“Did you know,” I aske
d the magus, “that when you think someone is very intelligent, you say he is clever enough to steal Hamiathes’s Gift?”
The magus cocked his head. “No, I didn’t. Is it just among your mother’s people?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I know what happened if you tried and got caught.”
“I don’t know that either,” the magus said, surprised by a gap in his scholarship. He wasn’t surprised that I knew. I suppose crime and punishment are things that most thieves keep track of.
“They threw you off the mountain.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to your mother. Maybe that’s why she left Eddis.” He was teasing, doing his best to lift my spirits. He’d either gotten over his anger or was pretending that he had.
“Not threw as in exile,” I said, and described with one hand the arc of someone falling a long distance. “Threw as in over the edge of the mountain.”
“Oh,” he said.
We were all quiet again. It was another quarter of an hour before we heard the sound the magus had been waiting for. It was a variation in the wash of the river beside us. The magus stood and turned to look at it. I did the same, and in the space of a few heartbeats the river disappeared. The flow of its water stopped, came again in slushy bursts over the falls, and then stopped again. It was as if a giant tap somewhere had been turned by the gods, and our ears, which had ceased to register the sound of water, were now pounded by the silence of no water at all.
I stood with my mouth open for a long time as I realized that upstream there was a reservoir and the water that made the Aracthus flowed through a sluice in its dam. At the end of the summer, if the water in the reservoir was too low, then the sluice gate was closed and the river disappeared. I shook my head in wonder.
In the bulging rock where the waterfall had been, there was a recessed doorway. The lintel of the doorway was the rock itself, but set into it were two granite pillars. Between the pillars was a door pierced by narrow slits that were wider in their middles and narrower at the ends. The river water still sprayed through these slits and dropped into the round pool that remained in the basin below.