The Queen of Attolia (14 page)

“We’ll have our invitation, one way or another, and once invited in, we will be hard to send home again,” said the Mede. “But, Kamet, I’ve noticed in you a
distressing tendency to err in your pronouns of late. You say ‘if you attack,’ instead of ‘if
we
attack.’”

The secretary dropped his eyes and held very still. “Forgive me,” he said.

“Of course,” said the Mede. He looked through narrowed lids at his secretary. “Are you tempted by the barbarian indulgences, Kamet?”

The slave shook his head slightly, still looking at the table in front of him. “I hope I have not made you angry.” He glanced up and dared a self-effacing smile.

“Good heavens,” said Nahuseresh. “Kamet, you’re love-struck.”

Kamet dropped his eyes again. “She’s very beautiful,” he said in his own defense.

Nahuseresh laughed. “She is. She has beauty even those cats in the imperial court would admire, but I hadn’t expected to see you fall victim to a pretty face.”

The secretary shrugged, too wise to say that he sympathized with the barbarian queen as her choices grew fewer and her freedom slipped away.

T
HE ROYAL ENGINEER WATCHED THE
water pouring through the sluice of the dam at the Hamiathes Reservoir and reported his measurements to the queen of Eddis. With the heavy spring rains and the snowmelt from the mountains, the gates of the reservoir remained open. To close them would risk their destruction.

When the water flow slackened, it was already summer in the lowland countries and Attolia and Sounis continued their war, leaving Eddis penned in by part of Attolia’s army at one side of the mountain pass and by Sounis’s army at the other. Attolia retreated from the islands Sounis attacked, waiting patiently for her opponent to make a mistake. Finally the engineer reported that it would be safe to shut the gates on the flow of the Aracthus, reducing the river to a small stream, at least for the length of a day, or a night, without risking damage to the dam. Eddis’s army ordered itself for a march
from the top of the main pass down to Attolia, leaving a smaller force to defend the main bridge in the event that Sounis decided to attack Eddis while her troops were committed elsewhere.

Campfires at night betrayed the size of the Eddisian force massing against Attolia, and her army in turn began its preparations. Attolia had expected that Eddis must make some effort to drive back her enemies or face starvation the following winter.

“She has made no alliance with Sounis? You are certain?” she asked the secretary of her archives.

“Nothing is ever certain, Your Majesty.” Relius had grown more cautious since the renaissance of the Thief of Eddis. “But if Sounis has made any agreements with Eddis, no one else knows of them. That is not to say that he will miss an opportunity to attack once you are involved in a land war.”

“We can hold the coast,” Attolia said, unworried, “and if we lose the islands, we will eventually gain them back again. So long as we hold Thegmis and Solon, he can’t easily pursue a land war. Eddis has made a tactical error, I think, if she believes that we will be pinched in a vise between her and Sounis.”

“Will you use the Mede’s ships to keep Sounis’s navy away?”

Attolia shook her head. “No. We don’t need their help for this.”

As the sun was setting, the engineer at the Hamiathes Reservoir ordered the main sluice gates on the dam lowered and watched carefully as the work was accomplished. The water strained against the wooden gates and forced its way in jets through the narrow gaps between the sluices, but the gates held. The royal messenger took the news to the palace, and the men waiting there began to move. Eddis spoke one last time to the general and the officers in charge of the men, and to her Thief. When she had given them their last instructions, she sent them on their way. She recalled the Thief as he reached the steps up to the door.

“My Queen?” He turned back, unsure what she required.

“Only for that,” said Eddis.

Eugenides smiled and bowed his head. “My Queen,” he said again, perhaps for the last time. Then he was gone.

Behind the last rush of the Aracthus, with their feet wet in the persistent trickle from the reservoir, a line of soldiers began their difficult journey in darkness, many glancing over their shoulders at the dam behind them until it disappeared from sight.

Because any torches might have been seen for miles across Attolia and reported to the capital, the stream of men twisted down the mountain in single file with only
the light provided by the full moon. The canyon of the empty riverbed rose on either side. There were few breaks in the slick stone walls, and the shadows had a solidity that deceived the inattentive. The riverbed under their feet was rocky and uneven, and many were burdened with ladders as well as their weapons and gear. Those in the rear struggled with block and tackle, roughly squared wooden beams, wooden carriages and cannon.

From time to time they passed an officer looking up the river and counting minutes on a pocket watch. The men cast anxious looks up the river themselves and waded as quickly as they were able through waters that were sometimes as deep as their waist. Eugenides stayed just ahead of the cannon and worried no less than the queen’s soldiers.

All of them sighed with relief when they reached the stopping place at the end of the first night. Those soldiers with ladders set them against the walls of the canyon, and others grouped themselves in lines to climb out of the water. Still others, more eager to be out of the riverbed, scrambled up the steep banks on their own. Once out of the canyon, the soldiers settled, as comfortably as they could, on a narrow shelf that ran along the edge of the Aracthus. The river, cutting its way down the mountains, had twisted around an outcropping of stone that had resisted erosion. The outcropping cut off the view of Attolia and hid the
soldiers from any observers below.

Xenophon, who was in nominal charge of the expeditionary force, stood at the lip above the Aracthus and watched as the men climbed and the equipment was hauled up. The last man had reached the safety of the shelf above the river and the ladders had been lifted and stacked when a flare fired from the reservoir above lit the sky for a brief moment. It was a green flare, to say that the gates had been opened as planned, not a red one to say that they had failed and that all the destructive force of the river was already rushing downward.

Xenophon looked for Eugenides. He had resisted as hard as he decently could being put in command of the Thief. He had pointed out to his sovereign, with glibness taking the place of tact, that the Thief had never so far as he knew been in the command of anyone. The queen had only smiled and assured him that Eugenides had promised to be tractable. Xenophon had had to yield with what grace he could muster, but Eugenides had been as good as his word throughout the planning stages of the campaign, and Xenophon had begun to eye him with cautious approval.

The Thief was sitting farther along the edge of the canyon with a watch in his hand, trying to read its face by moonlight.

“One of your brother’s?” Xenophon asked when he’d walked up behind him.

“Yes,” the Thief said. “He made it for me.”

“And the time?”

“Late, sir. They’ve held the water back half an hour, and we used up that half hour getting here. It must have taken longer to get the last men on their way.”

“That’s not unexpected. They’ll plan the safety margins accordingly on the next stages.”

Then they waited, and in time the waters of the Aracthus rose beside them, relieving the pressure on the sluice gates and catching up with the water that had gone before. The Aracthus often crested in the late evenings, swollen by the runoff from snow melting in the mountains, and the Eddisians hoped the rising and dropping water level wouldn’t be noticed in the lowlands, where the irrigation channels had been destroyed by flooding and were not being rebuilt since they might be flooded again.

They waited through the day, those who could sleeping, the rest watching the blue sky for the first sign of clouds. A summer rainfall wouldn’t threaten the dam behind them, but if clouds obscured the moon, the rocky riverbed would be impossible to navigate.

When the sun had set and the sky was dark, the waters trickled away, and the soldiers climbed down and moved on.

At the end of the second night of the march, Xenophon stood in the riverbed, looking up at the sheer walls on either side of him. “I can’t see a damn thing,” he said.

“There’s one,” Eugenides said, pointing to a black
oblong in the cliffside, a hole in the stone suspicious for its squareness. “The others are right there in a row.”

Xenophon waved to the men with the ladders, and they lifted and set them near the holes carved in the stone walls. Working carefully, with a great deal of swearing, they were able to lift into place a series of beams across the chasm of the riverbed. It was at its narrowest just above its steepest drop. Below the falls, the soldiers would have room to march beside the river, but the dawn was nearing, and they couldn’t get down the cliffside in time to escape the rush of the Aracthus’s waters. Nor could they get out of the riverbed. Even if they’d had the means to climb the steep walls of the canyon, once outside it, they would have been exposed on the hillside, visible to anyone below.

The beams fit, not neatly but effectively, into narrow holes carved into the stone.

“How long have these been here?” Xenophon asked the Thief, who shrugged his shoulders.

“You’d have to ask my father. They are a military resource, and I knew of them only by accident. I read a reference to them in a scroll that was a hundred and fifty years old,” he said. “There was some unrest with Attolia then, and the king had sentinels posted here. The cuts were already made.”

“And you’re sure they are above the level of the river in flood?”

“They were a hundred and fifty years ago,” said
Eugenides wickedly.

Xenophon beetled his brows and frowned at the Thief. “I had your father’s word that those orifices existed and would support beams across the chasm and that the beams so supported would be above the level of the river.”

Eugenides relented. “We sent a stonemason down to check them to be sure they hadn’t eroded. They all seem to be well above the high-water line.”

Xenophon looked up at the structure that had taken form over his head. Nets stretched between the beams made a series of platforms. “Time to climb up, I suppose.” He glanced at the Thief and then away, refraining at the last moment from asking if Eugenides could make the climb unassisted. Obviously he could if he had gotten up the ladders the night before. The Thief was wet to the neck, so he must have fallen at least once on the way down the river, but so had almost everyone. Those soldiers not engaged in the work of stringing the nets overhead stood in water up to their knees and shivered.

Eugenides had seen Xenophon’s look and guessed its meaning. He stiffened, and Xenophon winced. He hadn’t meant to offend. The general turned away and started ordering his soldiers into their positions. This was the second set of platforms, and there was still one more set to be put into place downstream.

Later, as the first light of dawn was showing in the
sky, Xenophon carefully crossed the net of the platform under him and sat beside Eugenides. He was impressed with the young man’s ability to keep up with the rest of his soldiers and was hesitating over how or whether to put this into words when the Thief spoke.

“I thought a messenger was to be sent down from the platforms upstream when the cannon barrels and carriages were secure,” he said.

“They probably weren’t sure he could get down the rocky part before the water hit. The canyon’s too deep here to see the flare,” Xenophon said.

“I think the water is at its height,” Eugenides was saying just as a sudden thud shook the platform.

With the rest of the soldiers, Xenophon clutched the rope net under him. Only the Thief didn’t. He leaned forward instead to look down into the river.

“What was it?” the general asked.

“I’m not sure,” Eugenides replied. “It was big. It might have been a tree trunk that’s been freed by the changing water pattern.” He sounded uncertain. “It might have been one of the cannon,” he said. “It didn’t hit the beam directly. It was a glancing blow.”

They sat thinking about what a direct blow would have done to the wooden supports for their nets.

The queen of Attolia stirred in her sleep and woke. She sat up slowly, blinking away the last traces of an unpleasant dream, and looked around the room. She
could see by the light of a small lamp left burning on the nightstand, but there were dark corners the light didn’t penetrate. There was a shadow behind the wardrobe, a deeper one at the edge of the window curtains. She sat up against her pillows. She pulled the bedclothes up as far as they would go and suppressed a perverse wish to have her old nurse come to chase away the darkness, perverse because she didn’t know if she wanted the shadows to be empty or not. She sat watching until the day dawned and the shadows lightened and were gone.

When the last glimmer in the sky had faded, and the waters of the Aracthus had drained away, the men on the banks climbed stiffly down into the damp riverbed. A messenger from upstream reported that three of the cannon barrels they transported had been unsecured when the waters of the Aracthus swept down the canyon. They’d lost sixteen men when two of the loose barrels had destroyed the support for a platform down river from Eugenides and Xenophon. Four of the twenty camped on the platform had managed to grasp the supports of a platform farther downstream and had been plucked out of the floodwaters. Of the rest of the men there was no sign.

The cannon were found at the edge of the pool at the base of the last great waterfall before the Aracthus reached the dystopia. “Two of them were split and unus
able. The third Xenophon decided was still worth the difficulty of transporting. He had snorted when he’d seen them by the bank and said, “Thank the gods we don’t have to dig them off the bottom.” The pool was deep, deepest where the waters of the river dropped into it. The bottom was invisible in the darkness, and retrieving cast-iron cannon from the depths would have been impossible.

Where the ground was level, the gorge was wider, and there was room for the soldiers to camp in relative comfort for the day. There were no fires, but the men took dry uniform tunics and pants from the waterproofed bags they’d carried on their shoulders and put them on. When the sun set, Xenophon began the cautious advance across the dystopia. Once again the cannon moved impossibly slowly, and the soldiers dragging them cursed.

“Attolia’s border patrols won’t come this far?” Xenophon checked with Eugenides. He needn’t have, these details had been discussed in Eddis, but Eugenides was happy to reassure him, glad that the responsibility of leadership was Xenophon’s, not his.

“I doubt they’ll bring their horses into the dystopia without good cause, certainly not at night,” he said.

Xenophon was relieved that the Thief no longer seemed offended by the general’s gaffe the night before. “This is the stupidest plan that I have ever in my career participated in,” he said.