“Sophos seems to have been paying attention, Ambiades. Would you like to hazard a guess why this sort of classification is important?”
“Not really,” said Ambiades.
“Do it anyway,” said the magus.
“Oh, I guess it’s so you can tell which trees should be planted where.”
“Go on.”
But Ambiades couldn’t think of anything else.
Sophos tried to help him out. “If you found a new tree, you might be able to tell if you could eat the fruit if you knew it was just like an olive tree?”
“If it was just like an olive tree it would be one,” snapped Ambiades. I put all my weight onto one stirrup and leaned over. I wanted to get a look at Sophos’s face to see if he was blushing. He was.
“Of course,” the magus pointed out, “if you can’t classify an olive, Ambiades, you wouldn’t know one if you saw one, would you?”
I leaned over on the other stirrup. Now Ambiades was blushing. He was scowling as well.
“Try again with the fig tree,” said the magus.
Ambiades poked and guessed his way through that classification, and I lost interest. I was getting tired. I ate my second orange.
Long before we reached Evisa, I was exhausted. I complained constantly that I was tired, but no one seemed to notice. I was also hungry. I told the magus I would starve in the saddle if I didn’t get something to eat, and he finally, reluctantly, opened the bundle with my lunch in it. But he insisted on dividing it equally among Ambiades, Sophos, and myself, even though I pointed out that they couldn’t possibly be as hungry as I was.
Ambiades nobly handed over some of his portion to me, but there was something about the way he did it that made my hackles rise.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached Evisa. The magus was disgruntled that we hadn’t made better time. He hadn’t reckoned on my outstanding skill with horses.
There was no inn at Evisa, but there was a woman who served food to travelers at a collection of tables under the trees in the town square. Ambiades and Sophos were equally horrified at the lunch—wrinkled olives and hard cheese—but the bread was soft and good. The yogurt had enough garlic in it to kill every vampire in the country. I ended up eating almost everything. It was hard to be a picky eater in the lower city of Sounis and impossible in the king’s prison.
“I told you that they weren’t hungry,” I said to the magus. “I don’t know why you didn’t let me have all the meat pies.” As I spoke, he pulled the bowl filled with shriveled olives out of my hand.
“You’ll make yourself sick,” he said.
I snagged a few more from the bowl as it was carried away, but I let the rest go. He was right. If I tried to force much more into my stomach, it was going to revolt. I tottered away from the table to a patch of grass, where I lay down and went to sleep. It seemed like only a few minutes before Pol was nudging me in the ribs again with his foot.
“Get up.”
“Go away.”
“I’ll get you up,” he warned.
“I don’t want to get up. I want you to go away.”
After he’d made sure that I was thoroughly awake, I told him that I hoped he was bitten by something poisonous in the next bed he slept in. I dragged myself up on one of the tables and looked at Ambiades, who was standing with the horses. “Bring mine over here,” I said. “I’m not moving the table over there.”
But Ambiades was not going to move a step at the request of a worthless and insolent petty criminal. Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.
For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but I wasn’t going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.
Pol and the magus went on studiously looking at the horse’s legs, leaving Ambiades and me to sort ourselves out. Ambiades had gotten himself into an intractable difficulty whether he knew it or not. He was bigger than I was, certainly, but he had to assume I would put up a vicious and potentially embarrassing fight if he tried to force me over to the horse. Sophos saved him, taking the horse’s reins and walking it over to the table.
Ambiades looked on in contempt, unaware, it seemed, that it was his dignity that Sophos had spared.
“Why didn’t you bring a cart?” I grumbled to the magus as we rode out of the town.
“A what?”
“A cart—you know, a large wooden box on wheels, pulled by horses.”
“Why would I have done that?” the magus asked, amused.
“So that I could be sleeping in the back of it right now.”
“I didn’t plan this trip with your comfort in mind,” he said sourly.
“Damn right.”
The horses ambled up the hills for another hour. The sun was setting when the magus finally grew disgusted and asked me if I thought I could stay on the horse’s back if it trotted.
“Probably not,” I told him honestly. By that time I was too tired to be optimistic.
“You’ll have to learn sooner or later. We’re not walking all the way. Ambiades,” he shouted, “ride back here and show him how to trot.” So Ambiades, who had gotten several hundred yards ahead of us, turned around and trotted his horse back.
“Nice seat.” Pol was just behind me, and I was a little surprised that he spoke without being spoken to first. The magus passed the compliment along to Ambiades, but he only scowled. He seemed as disgruntled by praise as he was by badgering.
“Now you, Sophos,” the magus called, and Sophos obeyed. Even I could see that he didn’t ride as well as Ambiades. I looked back at Pol to see what his opinion was. He winced.
The magus commiserated, “Too bad you can’t take Ambiades home to be duke and let me keep Sophos to be magus.”
“He’s going to be a duke?” I said, surprised. One didn’t usually find a future duke as an apprentice of anyone. I didn’t expect an answer, but Ambiades supplied one of a sort.
“If his father doesn’t strangle him first,” he said.
My lesson in horseback riding became a lesson for Sophos as well. The three of us fell back while Ambiades and the magus trotted ahead.
“Pol thinks you ride like a sack of loose rocks,” Ambiades told Sophos before he left. Sophos reddened, and Pol told Ambiades to get moving. A little later we heard pieces of a lecture the magus was giving him about plant classification and its importance. I tried to pay attention to both the lecture and the riding instructions but eventually gave up and listened to Pol.
He was explaining that the horse’s shoulder lifted not when the foot did but when the foot came down. “Now,” said Pol, “hold up your hand like this.” He held it up as if he were blessing the fields beside him. Sophos imitated him, and Pol smacked him hard in the palm with his fist. When Pol told him to hold the hand back up, he did, but he jerked it backward and Pol’s second blow barely touched him. It was a simple lesson that my father had taught me years ago. If you think you are going to be hit, at least try to move out of the way. My father taught it to me with the flat side of his sword.