The Sky was angry. He took up some of the black soil from Earth’s valleys and some of the snow from her mountains, and he mixed them together and blew hard and scattered them across the world. Every speck of dust grew into a human, some dark like the valley soil and some white as the snow. So, though we come from the Earth, we must thank the Sky for our creation, because it was the Sky that made man. But he was impatient and did not do such a job as the Earth would have done. Man came out small and weak and without the gifts of the gods. When the Sky sent men to clear the forest around the lakes, that he might see them, they were too weak to pull down the trees.
Earth looked at them climbing through her forests and said, “Why have you made these?”
And the Sky was ashamed, and he told her that he wanted to see the lakes, and the Earth was ashamed and said that she wanted the Sky to speak only to her. The Sky promised that he would look at the lakes only sometimes, and the Earth promised to hide only some of the lakes in the trees. And they were happy.
But Earth watched the humans that the Sky had made and felt sorry for them. They were cold and hungry. So she gave them fire to make them warm, and she gave them seeds to scatter on the ground. She made animals for them to eat, but no matter what gifts she gave them the humans were ungrateful. They thanked only the Sky for having made them. The Earth grew angry and she shook with her anger, and the houses that the humans had built fell down and the animals that they had gathered were frightened and ran away, and the humans realized that they had made a terrible mistake. From then on there were always some humans who thanked the Earth for her gifts and some humans who thanked the Sky for their creation.
When the magus was finished, the group of us sitting around the fire was quiet. Then Sophos asked, “The people in Eddis, do they really believe that?”
I barked with laughter, and everyone looked at me. “In the city of Sounis do they really believe that the Nine Gods won the Earth in a battle with Giants? That the First God spawns godlets left and right and his wife is a shrew who is always outwitted?” I lifted the back of my head off the ground and crossed my arms underneath it. “No, they don’t believe that, Sophos. It’s just religion. They like to go up to the temple on feast days and pretend that there is some god who wants the worthless sacrificial bits of a cow, and people get to eat the rest. It’s just an excuse to kill a cow.”
“You sound very learned, Gen. What do you know about it?” asked the magus.
I sat up and moved to the fire before I answered him. “My mother was from the mountain country. It’s no different there. Everybody goes to the temple, and everybody likes to hear the old stories after dinner, but that doesn’t mean they expect a god to show up at their door.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” I said, letting my tongue run away from me. “And you made a lot of mistakes. You aren’t even pronouncing the name of the country right. The people on the mountains call it Eeddis, not Eddis. And you left out the part where the Earth cries when the Sky God ignores her and turns the oceans to salt.”
“I did?”
“Yes, I told you, my mother told me the stories when I was little. I know them all, and I know that they call the country Eeddis.”
“As for that, Gen, I can tell you that Eeddis is the old pronunciation used before the invaders came. We’ve changed the pronunciation of many of our words since the time of the invaders, while Eddisian pronunciations haven’t altered for centuries. Eddis is pronounced differently now, whatever the people of that country say.”
“It’s their country,” I grumbled. “They ought to know the right name for it.”
“It isn’t that Eeddis is the wrong name, Gen. It’s just an old way of saying the same word. The rest of the civilized world has moved on. Tell me what other mistakes I made.”
I told him as many as I’d noticed. Most of the mistakes were bits of the story that he had left out.
When I was done, he said, “It’s always interesting to hear different versions of people’s folktales, Gen, but you shouldn’t think that your mother’s stories are true to the original ones. I’ve studied them for many years and am sure that I have the most accurate versions. It often happens that emigrants like your mother can’t remember parts of the original, so they make things up and then forget that the story was ever different. Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.”
“My mother never debased anything in her entire life,” I said hotly.
“Oh, don’t be offended,” the magus said. “I’m sure she never meant to, but your mother wasn’t educated. Uneducated people rarely know much about the things they talk about every day. She probably never even knew that your name, Gen, comes from the longer name Eugenides.”
“She did, too,” I insisted. “You’re the one that doesn’t know anything. You never knew my mother, and you don’t know anything about her.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I know about her. She fell from a fourth-story window of Baron Eructhes’s villa and died when you were ten years old.”
The wind sighed in the pine needles over my head. I’d forgotten that that was written in the pamphlet that was my criminal record. The king’s courts were apt to have a pickpocket’s entire life story written in tiny handwriting on a collection of paper sheets folded together in the prison’s record room.
The magus saw that he had cut deep and went on. His voice dripped condescension. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Gen is a family name. The title of King’s Thief is a hereditary one now in Eddis, and I think the current Thief is named Eugenides. Maybe you’re related. A cousin, perhaps, to someone exalted.” He snickered. I could feel my face burning and knew that I was red right to the hairline.
“Eugenides,” I nearly stuttered, “was the god of thieves. We are all named after him.” I jumped up from the fire and stamped back to the blanket that was mine. The night was cool, so I wrapped up in the wool cloak and admitted to myself that the magus had gotten the better of me in that exchange. Everyone else seemed to agree.
The magus was as smug as a cat the next day. Pol made breakfast, and then we packed up, careful to leave no sign of our presence beside the trail. Sophos and Ambiades collected pine needles to cover the burnt space of our cooking fire. By noon we had reached the other side of the mountain ridge and were looking at our descent.
“I am not going down that until I’ve had lunch,” I announced. “I have no intention of dying on an empty stomach.” I was flip but perfectly serious, and when the magus tried to force me, I balked. He cuffed me on the head with his seal ring, but I wouldn’t budge. I was going to rest before I started down a shale slope where I would need not only my balance but all the strength that the king’s prison had left in my legs. I dug in my heels and wouldn’t move. We had lunch.
After lunch we started down the mountainside. I wanted to go last, but Pol wouldn’t let me. I went second to last and only had to worry about the rocks that Pol kicked down. The magus, who went first, had Pol’s rocks as well as mine, Sophos’s, and Ambiades’s. I sent down a few especially for him but felt bad when Sophos caught one of the rocks that Pol kicked loose squarely in the back of the head. None of us could stop to see if he was badly hurt until we’d reached the end of the flysch. It was about seventy-five feet to the bottom of it, and as soon as we were safely on solid rock, Pol checked Sophos.