When Costis stepped forward, the king looked him carefully up and down. He leaned closer to peer at the buckles on Costis’s breastplate, while Costis counted back in his head the number of days it had been since he’d polished them. The king’s subsequent look of dissatisfaction left Costis certain that somewhere there was a buckle undone or an unburnished spot on his breastplate.
“I understand you are now an unassigned guard?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
The king addressed his captain. “Is he going to dangle like a loose thread from your tidy schedule?”
“I am sure I can find a use for him, Your Majesty.”
“I have a place ready made,” said the king. “He can serve me.”
“The units that serve the king are fully made up, Your Majesty, but we could enlarge one unit if you like.”
“No, not in someone else’s squad.”
“You want him detached from the Guard?” Teleus was puzzled.
“I thought as…lieutenant.”
Teleus was stunned.
“Yes.” The king nodded his head with sudden decision. “I want him promoted to lieutenant-at-large, and I want him assigned to me. Every day from now until I dismiss him. Morning and afternoon. I will inform him if I want him with me in the evenings. He can begin now.”
“Costis has not been trained as a lieutenant,” Teleus protested politely. “He does not know the protocols for serving within the inner palace.”
“He can learn as he goes.” The king lifted the gun out of Costis’s hand. A lieutenant didn’t carry one. He passed it to Teleus to dispose of, and waved in dismissal.
When Teleus still stood, the king waved again, shooing him off like a trespassing pigeon. The captain bowed, cast a look at Costis full of dire warning, and retired.
“I believe he was instructing you not to disgrace yourself,” said the king, and then turned to his attendants. “Where are we going this morning?” he asked.
The day that followed took on the same nightmarish impossibility of the day before. Bewildered, Costis followed the king and his attendants and guards as they led the way through the convoluted passages of a palace pieced together by at least seven known architects over a span of uncounted years. He observed the king’s tutorial on olive production and taxation. When it was over, the king asked Costis whether he thought it was better to levy a tax per tree or try to estimate olive production year to year.
“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” Costis answered.
“Hmm,” said the king. “I thought you grew up on a farm?”
The tutorial on olive production was followed by a lesson in Mede. As the king wandered around the room, obviously bored and unreluctant to show it, Costis tried to stay alert. The king seemed to know by divine inspiration when his attention wandered.
“Costis. The word for death in Mede, I can’t remember it.”
Costis racked his brain, searching that part of the mind that remembered the last few words it had heard without actually understanding them. “Shuut,” he said at last. Clearly annoyed, the king asked him another question and another until Costis couldn’t produce an answer, and then a few more questions after that. The conjugation of to hit, the word for traitor, the word for idiot.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty. I didn’t hear that part of the lesson,” said Costis. None of those things had been mentioned by His Majesty’s tutors.
“You might pay attention to what’s going on around you, instead of daydreaming. My life does depend on it, you know.”
Costis thought perhaps he’d died and somehow crossed the river into hell without noticing the trip.
At last, one of the attendants stepped forward to say that it was time for the king to return to his apartment to eat. The king’s instructors thanked the king with every appearance of sincerity.
In the hallway, the king dropped back to walk behind his attendants and beside Costis.
“So, Costis,” he said, “have you learned all you need to know of Mede?”
“No, sir,” said Costis, judging that to be the safest answer.
The king yawned, covering his mouth with his hand. “Me neither,” he said.
They had reached a corner. The attendants who had been in front of them had politely slowed until the king was once more even with his retinue. Sejanus murmured a direction.
The king looked around. “I thought it was that way.” He pointed.
“No, Your Majesty,” the attendants patiently chorused.
The entrance to the king’s apartments, like the queen’s, was always guarded. The king nodded at the guards and passed through the door from the corridor. Costis hesitated, unsure if he should wait in the hall or pass through himself. A hand between his shoulder blades impelled him forward. Through the door, he found a guardroom, elegantly paneled in wood, lit by deep windows in the far wall. It was the entrance room to the king’s private chambers, and it held more soldiers and one of Teleus’s lieutenants. Costis himself, he remembered with a shock, was also one of the captain’s lieutenants.
The guards standing around the room at attention must moments before have been occupying the benches that lined the walls. The king waved, a gesture of simultaneous recognition and dismissal, and the guards settled from the rigor of attention to a slightly more relaxed but respectful posture. A guard opened a door to the king’s right, and he passed through, followed by his attendants. Costis knew from palace rumor and from Sejanus that the room beyond must be the king’s bedroom. There was no other anteroom.
These were not the royal apartments with layers and layers of social defense, anterooms, audience rooms, and more anterooms, between the guardroom and the queen’s most private space. The queen had not vacated the king’s apartments, and Eugenides had evidently declined to move into what were traditionally the queen’s rooms. If he had, his rooms would have connected through interior doors to the king’s suite and nighttime traffic between the rooms would have been a matter for speculation and not public record. As it was, the king could not visit the queen without an embarrassing trek through a roomful of his guards and attendants, down a corridor, and along the same public path past the queen’s guards and her attendants. It was well known that this had never happened. The king rarely visited the queen’s apartments and only during the day. The queen had never been in these apartments.
“You may go if you like, Costis,” the king called from the inner room. “But don’t be late getting back for the afternoon court.”
The door closed and Costis was left standing. He looked helplessly at the lieutenant, who stared back with an appraising look. He looked over Costis’s shoulders at the veterans in the squad behind him. The hair on Costis’s neck crawled as the veterans offered their silent report. It may have been positive; the lieutenant smiled and told Costis that he was off duty.
“Then I just leave?”
“That is so. Be sure to get back in time to escort him from here to the afternoon court. I’ll make sure one of the men on duty in the afternoon tells you where to stand in the Audience Hall.”
Only as Costis stepped into the passage outside the king’s apartment did he realize he had no idea how to get out of the palace. He looked over his shoulder at the guards outside the king’s door. They looked blandly back, and Costis wasn’t fool enough to ask directions. Taking a deep breath, he decided to retrace his steps to the main part of the palace. Once there he would be on familiar ground.