CHAPTER FOUR

IN the morning, Costis got a better idea of what the captain had meant when he had said that the king’s sense of humor was playing itself out. Costis thought it was not humor so much as sheer vindictiveness.

The training session with the swords was as tedious as the day before. With long, painful pauses, they practiced the early exercises over and over. Afterward, Costis hurried to clean himself in the baths and then went to present himself in the king’s guardroom. He had the day’s passwords and arrived without delay.

The king had bathed but was not yet dressed.

The door between the bedchamber and the guardroom was open, and Costis could hear every part of the process of dressing the king, and see most of it. From the conversation, he attached the names he already knew to some of the men waiting on the king. Hilarion, the heavyset attendant, was the second son of a coastal baron. He brought the king the wrong trousers and was sent back to the wardrobe. Dionis, who was the nephew of another baron, brought him the wrong shirt. He was also sent back to the wardrobe, somewhere through a doorway on the opposite side of the guardroom from the king’s bedchamber. Nothing seemed to suit the king, and the attendants passed back and forth across the guardroom with rejected items. At first Costis blamed the king’s vanity, but slowly he realized that this was all a dance enacted by the attendants and directed by Sejanus. The guards on duty watched in amusement. Sejanus winked as he passed Costis with an ink-stained sash.

The king had chosen a Mede style of dress with a long, open coat over his shirt and tunic. The longer belled sleeves of the coat should have concealed the cuff and hook he had in place of his missing hand, but the coat the attendants brought had been miscut by the tailor. The sleeves were too short. Not only the hook but the entire cuff stuck gracelessly out of the sleeve. The king sent it back.

Sejanus, smoothly conciliatory to the king’s face, pushed his arms backward into the sleeves of the coat as he was leaving and stared in silent consternation at his arms, sticking out of the shortened sleeves all the way to the elbow. He waggled the fingers on his left hand and then turned in horror to his right hand, where his fingers were bent in the shape of a hook. Snatching at the sleeve with his left hand, he pulled his right hand in until it was hidden, then tucked it under his left arm, hiding it further, and looked around in mock chagrin. Someone in the guardroom, staring in over Costis’s shoulder, choked on a laugh, and the three attendants standing in front of the king, in his view, were suffused and rigid.

There seemed to be little that the king could do to control his attendants. He might dismiss them from his service, but Costis guessed that dismissing them would only reveal his inability to control them. So Eugenides sat, with his jaws locked, and ignored Sejanus.

Presently, when he’d been given clothes and been obsequiously helped to dress, the king called Costis. He looked him over closely, as he had the day before.

“Are you a typical example of the Guard, Costis? I am a little surprised. After all, you aren’t really soldiers, and given that you serve a mostly decorative function, I would have expected you to be more…decorative.”

Most of the attendants had the kindness to look uncomfortable, knowing that Costis was paying for their transgressions. Hilarion glared at the king, safely out of his line of sight. Sejanus only looked amused. He raised his eyebrows and smiled as if he expected Costis to share the joke.

In this way, Costis fully realized his new function. He had been elevated from obscurity so that there would be some victim in the pecking order lower than the king.

If the king hoped to make Costis, and through him the Guard, look foolish, he had chosen the wrong target. That day, and every day, the soldiers of the Guard treated him as a lieutenant, and not as a joke. With the king, he served as the butt of the king’s humor, but the men of the Guard, some veterans twice his age, saluted Costis with pointed rigor and deferentially called him sir. Even Teleus made no distinction between how he treated Costis and how he dealt with his other lieutenants. The attention made Costis uncomfortable at first. He felt like a fraud, but the show of respect was no sham. The Guard wanted him to be a lieutenant, not an imitation of one, and their confidence in him supplied the strength he needed to suffer the king’s company with dignity.

He had support from another source as well, an anonymous one. He thought it was Sejanus, but had no proof that it was the king’s most successful tormentor that sent a package from time to time with notes on the king’s lessons. The first one arrived the second day of Costis’s new duty. Costis sat in his lieutenant quarters and examined what he’d found waiting for him on the bed. It was a flat package in a cloth wrapper tied with string. A folded note had been slipped under the string.

“To assist in your lessons,” it said, “from one who wishes you well in your contest.” That, Costis thought, defined his role in no uncertain terms. Whether he wished it or not, he was an opponent of the king.

Costis opened the cloth wrapping and found a collection of vellum sheets, neatly folded, covered in writing. He carried the paper to the window and read over someone’s detailed notes on the structure of the Mede language. The handwriting was square but uneven, as if the hand that held the quill had been shaking. If it was Sejanus, he had probably been laughing as he wrote. Several pages were covered back and front with vocabulary lists. Costis glanced through the lists, looking for the words the king had quizzed him with the day before. The infinitive of hit and the words for traitor and idiot had been added to the bottom of the list.

Costis looked back at the note. It was unsigned. The package might have come from one of the king’s instructors, but it was more likely to be one of the king’s attendants. Sejanus was clearly the leader even though the attendant Hilarion was oldest and Philologos, the youngest attendant, an heir to a baron, was the highest in rank. Costis looked over the sheets again. He wished he’d gotten a written explanation of the issues involved in olive production. He thought he would need one.

“Thank you, Costis,” said the king, dismissing him.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” said Costis, dismissed.

The king crossed through the middle of the training ground and met his attendants on the far side. In a crowd, they passed through an arch and out of sight. As they disappeared, Costis turned for the archway behind him, the king’s exit releasing him from his polite position. The soldiers cleared a path for him, and he hurried. His clothes and gear were waiting for him at the baths. He had just enough time to duck into the cavernous building through a side door, skirt the coldwater plunge, and cut through the steam room to the dressing room beyond. The steam room was usually empty so early in the morning, and the few occupants knew who he was and why he was hurrying. They shouted encouragement instead of curses as he passed through in a draft of cold air.

Between the steam room and the dressing rooms, a valet waited with a bucket of warm water to dump over him. Costis soaped hastily and was doused again. The valet handed him a cloth, and he dried himself as he headed toward his clothes. With the valet’s help he got dressed as quickly as possible, had his greaves buckled on and his breastplate buckled over his shoulders and under his arms. He bent his head so the man could run a comb through his hair, while he fumbled for a coin, which he couldn’t afford to give away. It was a ritual gesture. The valet waved it away with a smile.