The king smiled. “You’ve been talking to Ornon.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Costis, still stiff.
“If I get up, I suppose you will be punished?”
“So I have been told, Your Majesty.”
“You needn’t worry. I don’t feel like dancing just at the moment. You will have a sinecure, a pathetically easy job.” He yawned.
He fell asleep soon thereafter, leaving Costis somewhat relieved and simultaneously depressed as he faced another very boring watch.
The king slept most of the morning. He woke just before noon with a violent start, but if he had had a nightmare, no visions from it lingered. He ate a little soup, after poking at it suspiciously and being reassured by Phresine that it had no lethium in it, and soon went back to sleep. When he woke in the afternoon, he looked better, but Costis’s relief was short-lived. The king was fretful and bored, casting dark looks at Costis out of the corner of his eye. Costis saw summary execution approaching. He could not, as Ornon had suggested, bludgeon the king over the head, and he suspected that nothing short of that would keep the king in bed much longer.
He was rescued by Phresine. She came in to sit with the king, first asking Costis to move the small upholstered chair closer to the bed. She leaned to rest a hand on the king’s forehead. He sighed petulantly.
“If I asked you nicely to go away, would you?”
“No, dear. I have become very fond of the lieutenant and hate to see him saddled with an impossible task. I’ll just stay a moment to be sure you aren’t tiring yourself.”
“By putting lethium in my food. You won’t get away with that twice.”
“I know,” said Phresine. “It’s a pity.”
The king eyed her thoughtfully. “This is ridiculous, you know.”
Phresine folded her hands in her lap and looked pleasant and unhelpful.
He conceded defeat. “Tell me a story, then,” said the king. “Keep me occupied.”
“A story?” Phresine was surprised. “What makes you think I can tell stories?”
“Insight,” said the king. “Go on.”
Phresine protested.
“A story, or I am getting up,” threatened the king, and twitched the bedcovers aside.
Phresine, in her turn, conceded defeat. “Very well,” and she smoothed the bedcovers back in place. “I have just the one in mind.”
“As long as it isn’t instructive.”
“How do you mean, my lord?” Phresine was prim again.
“I mean I’m not appearing in this drama. I don’t want to hear the story about the wayward, self-indulgent boy who learns the error of his ways and grows up to be a model of decorum and never cuts anybody’s head off for spite.”
Phresine smiled. “You wouldn’t do such a thing, my lord.”
“I might. I remember suggesting it to Eddis any number of times.”
“You wouldn’t do such a thing, my lord,” Phresine repeated calmly.
“No, I wouldn’t. I hate killing people. There’s a secret you need to keep to yourself because I will have to kill people whether I want to or not. Yet another reason no sane man would choose to be king.”
Phresine looked very pained at the king’s bitter humor, but only commented with a word. “Awkward.”
“There you have it. Don’t give me an instructive story.”
“Not I,” said Phresine. “Do you know the story of Klimun and Gerosthenes?”
“No.”
“That’s not surprising. It’s a story from Kathodicia in the north, where I was raised. It’s a very remote place.”
“I was there.”
“Really? Not many can say so.”
“I was six. My grandfather took me. I don’t remember anything but towers of rock.”
“Well, Klimun was a king of all Kathodicia in the time before the archaic. He was a great king, a powerful ruler respected by all.”
“Now I know this isn’t about me.”
“Hush,” said Phresine, and began her story.
Klimun didn’t begin as a great king. He was a prince only of his people, a Basileus, in a small valley surrounded by rolling hills. In the Kathodicia, young men as well as young women visit the temple of the moon when they have reached their majority. They leave offerings on the altar there, and depending on the young man, they ask a favor of the goddess or make a demand.
Phresine smiled and gave an example: “O Goddess, I have brought you a silver plate, so you must make all of my ewes bear twins this season.”
Klimun was not an Annux, not a king over other princes yet, and as I said, his city was not a powerful one. On the contrary, it was on an evening when there was starvation and sickness and death among his people that Klimun made his way up the sacred path by moonlight to the temple.
His city had been fighting with the surrounding cities for many years. Outside its walls, the fields had been stripped bare by passing armies and the olive groves were nothing but stumps. Fields can be reseeded every year, but there is little point in planting trees that will be cut down before they grow old enough to bear fruit. So, where there is no peace, there are no trees. Inside, the city was filled with slaves taken after Kathodicia’s victories, but so many times had Kathodicia suffered defeats, and so many of her citizens were serving out their lives as slaves in other cities, that Kathodicians were scarce inside their own walls.
All the cities nearby were the same. Their fields produced little, and their orchards nothing. When they ran out of food, they looked for others to steal from. The people in the weakest cities starved. So all the cities sacrificed to their patron gods and goddesses, begging for their favors to make them victorious over their enemies. Everyone expected that when Klimun went to the temple, he would do the same and promise the goddess that every city they defeated they would sack for treasures to fill her temple. He didn’t.
Supplicants usually brought silver to the temple of the moon, or pure white cloth. Sometimes they brought expensive perfumes, but by and large they brought things in silver or white to please the taste of the goddess. Klimun brought a tree. He brought the sapling of an olive and placed it in the open center of the temple where the moon shone down on it.
The goddess, to whom no one had ever given a tree, came down with the moonlight for a closer look. The moon was young that night, and she appeared as a girl nearly Klimun’s age. She had shone on him in the past, and seen what her light had revealed in him.
“Most people bring me more precious gifts, Basileus,” she said.
“O Goddess,” said Klimun, “I have brought you the most precious silver in my city. The silver leaves of the olive. Like all supplicants at your altar, I come begging a favor. Please, Goddess, make me a good leader for my people. Let me bring them peace, and I swear I will cover the hills around the city with silver, in your honor. Everywhere the moon shines around the city it will strike the silver leaves of the olive, I promise.”
She considered the empty hills around the city and the rows of broken stumps. “It would be pretty,” she said aloud, “covered in trees.” She told Klimun, “Very well, cover the hills with olive groves, and I will bring the peace they need to live. But you will have to free the first captive that you see when you leave the temple, and never let the moonlight find you telling a lie. Failing that, your olives will be razed and your city, too.”