He went from the training ground to the mess hall, hesitating for a moment in the doorway. No one greeted him. No one even looked at him. He looked, but didn’t see Aristogiton. Costis hoped that it was because he was on duty, but suspected Aris had avoided a situation where he must either throw in his lot with Costis or publicly ignore him. Costis headed toward the kitchen, and the line of men gathered there melted out of his way. He collected a bowl of ground cereal and a dish of yogurt and a handful of dried fruit. He sat at a long table at the side of the room.
He looked at the food and couldn’t bring himself to eat.
He was too proud to get up and leave.
A bowl dropped, not lightly, onto the table beside him. The wooden bowl hitting the wooden table announced like a knock on the temple door that someone had come to sit beside him.
“Aris, don’t be a fool.”
“Too late to change now,” said Aris as he stepped over the bench and sat beside Costis. He looked around the room, daring anyone to object. Instead, after a moment, one of the other squad captains, senior to both of them, stood up from his table and crossed the room to join them.
“It isn’t,” he said as he dropped onto the bench, “as if we weren’t, every one of us, happy to see him knocked flat on his back.”
One by one, the other squad leaders joined the group, and Costis passed from one kind of embarrassment to another, less painful but no less acute, as they teased him about his practice session with the king. Costis put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands, pointedly ignoring the rest of the table, but knowing privately that the weak feeling in his knees was relief. He no longer had a squad, but he was still a member of the Guard, not a disgraced outcast.
The other squad leaders ate and moved on. Aris stayed a little longer. “You should eat,” he pointed out to Costis.
“I will,” Costis promised. He’d been too sick and then too embarrassed to get on with his breakfast. “Why do you think they did it?” he asked, grateful but puzzled to have been brought back from exile.
“They like you,” said Aris. “They respect you.”
“Why?” asked Costis, unaware that he might be admirable in any way.
Aris put his head in his hands, an image of despair at such naiveté. “That, Costis, is the difference between you and, say, someone like Lieutenant Enkelis. You didn’t think you deserved to be promoted after Thegmis; you said you were just doing your duty. Enkelis never lets a good job go by without taking credit for it. He wants to be captain someday, so he makes sure he is better than anyone else. You just want to be better, and that’s why everyone thought you’d make centurion and lieutenant and maybe captain, someday. They wanted you to be captain. They’ll never want Enkelis.” Aris drained his cup and stood. “I’m on duty soon. You should eat.”
Costis didn’t take his advice immediately. He was thinking. Too soon he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Wash and dress,” Teleus said. “The king wants to see you.”
Costis looked at him in bewilderment.
“Hurry,” Teleus prompted.
After one regretful look at his breakfast, for which he had finally acquired an appetite, Costis went. With Teleus standing there, he couldn’t even snatch a fig. He hurried to his room to collect his gear and carried it in his arms down the stairs and across the courtyard to the baths.
The Guard’s baths were in a building as big as one of the barracks. It had a domed top as elegant as anything designed for the patriarchs of the court, though its insides were fairly utilitarian. There was no time for the steam room and the strigil afterward. Costis dumped his clothes onto a bench and hurried to the tepidarium to scoop a bucket of hot water out and dumped it over his head. There was a hard lump of soap sitting in a stone dish that he used to scrub himself. There was no lather. Aris said that the lumps provided in the bathhouse weren’t soap at all, but stone, and that they cleaned by abrading the dirt from the skin, not soaping it away. He scooped more water out to rinse himself, and stepped back across the slate floors, careful that he didn’t slip.
A valet appeared with a scrap of cloth to dry him and helped Costis into the clothes. Once the breastplate was buckled in place, the valet stepped back, and Costis shrugged his hands helplessly. “I haven’t got a coin. I’m sorry.” All of his money had disappeared. There would be no more until the next payday.
The valet waved a hand in forgiveness and Costis hurried away.
Teleus led the way up to the palace. Following his captain, Costis worried and wondered what the next stage of his fate might be. The captain had said only that the king wanted to see him and expected him at breakfast. Nervously, he followed Teleus through the many hallways and rooms of the palace, at first familiar then increasingly less so. As a member of the Eighth Century, Costis had never been in the inner palace. Some of the doorways were guarded, and at each, the guards saluted Teleus and he nodded as they passed. Finally they crossed a narrow courtyard and went through an arched tunnel that led to a terrace overlooking the queen’s garden. Waiting there were the queen’s attendants, a table laid with dishes and breakfast, and, sitting alone at the table, the queen.
She glanced up at Teleus, but didn’t speak. Teleus took a position near the entrance to the archway and waited. Costis did the same.
The king arrived, preceded by his own squad of soldiers and his attendants. His hair was damp and unoiled. His skin looked freshly scrubbed. He noted Costis as he passed him and turned his head to give him a brief smile as if acknowledging a point that Costis had scored in arriving first.
“You’re late,” said Attolia to her husband.
“My apologies,” said the king. One of his attendants pulled out a chair for him and he sat at the table. The attendants bowed and withdrew, leaving the king and queen alone except for their guards.
“That waistband doesn’t go with that coat,” said the queen.
“As you have already noted, I was late.” Eugenides bent his head to look at his waist. His coat was yellow, and so was the waistband, but the shades were not the same. “My attendants have triumphed this morning in their quest to make me look foolish.”
“You are unhappy with your attendants,” the queen said. The flesh between Costis’s shoulders crawled at the implied fate of any man or woman who failed the queen’s expectations.
“Oh, no,” said the king. “There’s no need to boil them in oil. No doubt in time their taste will improve.”
“Perhaps if you did not order your clothes in colors that would suit a canary?”
The king tilted his head to one side and eyed her for a moment as if weighing his response. “You’re right,” he agreed placidly. “I should stick to an Eddisian tunic in black with black embroidery and shiny black boots. I can powder my hair with gray like a Continental, and you can pretend you married my father.”
The queen waved at the guard around them, and the soldiers withdrew, out of hearing distance, but not before they heard the queen tell her king that his father at least had a sense of dignity.
“And he’s never late for breakfast,” observed the king, taking a bite of a pastry.
When breakfast was over, the king stepped around the table and bent to kiss his wife’s cheek. This assertion of ownership, the queen endured like stone. Costis was transfixed. He struggled to imagine her own mother kissing the queen and balked, seeing instead an adult Attolia somehow shrunk to the size of a child. Distracted by the image, he was late to realize that everyone on the terrace was looking at him. The king had motioned him to approach and waited with one eyebrow raised.