The Thief Anniversary Read-along - Chapters 4-6
Welcome to the second part of the anniversary read-along of The Thief! This week's read-along is chapters 4-6. It starts with the sentence "WE STOPPED AGAIN EARLY IN the evening." and ends with "Did he sound genuinely flattered?" I'm not going to give page numbers because I have an ebook version, but my discussion's mostly chronological and I'll give quotes.
Like all the readalongs - SPOILERS! I'll also talk a little bit about the other books, so be wary if you haven't read them yet.
Chapter 4 continues with the travel, but these few chapters are really interesting because they are where Turner starts giving hints about what's happening, who the various characters are and what they're like, and of course, the background of Eddis, Sounis and Attolia with the old stories. One of the best parts of re-reading is picking up the clues that seemed just like the usual filler, or just descriptive phrases. It's all there if you know what to look for!
Chapter 4 has a lot of interaction between Gen, Sophos, Ambiades, and the magus. (Pol's kind of quiet generally.) The magus quizzes his two apprentices, and Ambiades veers mostly between extremely irritable and OK, while Sophos seems knowledgeable but defers totally to Ambiades. Gen makes himself a thorn in the magus' side. The quizzing is also an excellent way to frame information about the world - not only physical geography and biology (like the trees!) but also about the countries' shared history, their current views on each other, the way their cultures clash.
And of course, when they make camp, the magus finally reveals what they're after, one of my favourite lines of the book:
“Do you mean,” I squawked, “that we are out here in the dark looking for something from a fairy tale?”
From what Sophos recites ("So Sophos recited what he knew while we ate our lunch. Eddis was ruled by a queen and a court of eleven ministers, including a prime minister...") we find out a lot about Eddis. Not only about her government - mostly a monarchy - but also that it controls the only passes between Sounis and Attolia, which give it a lot more power than its tininess and its reliance on the imports of food suggest. Sophos gives a fairly factual description, with the sort of trivia you might find in a book about a country - thus the comment about All About Our Neighbours, which I thought made an interesting not-Greek flavour. (Turner has mentioned in the notes that she never intended Eddis et al to be the ancient world, what with the guns and the watches and the coffee. Little details like that are peppered throughout.) But back to the three countries: interestingly, it is Ambiades who gives the information about the passes and how that gives Eddis political power, and the power to shape the three countries' history; they closed the passes to keep Sounis from invading. This is also a tactic that will be used later on, in the war - if necessary Eddis can destroy her own roads and bridges, and prevent anyone from crossing. Ambiades is quick on the questions with power and influence and generally, but he is indifferent at the history and natural history parts.
“And do you know if that has always been true?”
Ambiades shrugged. “Since the invaders.”
He's certainly not stupid, but he's impatient and doesn't care about things he thinks is unnecessary.
Wrapped in the discussion about Hamiathes' stone is the way it's taken on the air of myth. One of the great things about The Thief is the worldbuilding that is facilitated through these stories. These build-ups of myth reflect our own history in the real world - most students in the western world end up learning about the Greco-Roman myths, and this riffs off those especially. The association gives this world a much greater depth. Turner can drop in a quick reference to Zeus and Hera, without even naming names, and the reader can fill in the rest; and given how rich that mythology is, it really makes the world much more fleshed out.
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?”
Gen treats the story of Hamiathes (at least externally) as a myth, and that, too, simultaneously makes him like us - enjoy it on a story level, don't believe in real life - and also quite like most fantasy protagonists, who are often skeptical of prophecies, myths, and their quests.
Another interesting thing I like about the little excerpt is the mention of the invaders. It's mentioned elsewhere, too; that the more fertile, coastal countries of Attolia and Sounis were conquered long ago, and it seems that while the invaders eventually were assimilated or driven away, they made lasting changes to their host countries' religions - always a hard, slow thing to change. This invasion and change in religion makes Eddis, who stayed clear, seem like a bit of a curious relic to the other two countries - they still worship (if not believe) the old gods. It also gives the three countries some history. It's not a culture that has stayed unchanging over a thousand years.
Sophos shook his head. “My father thinks that we should forget the old gods. He says that a country with two sets of gods is like a country with two kings. No one knows which to be loyal to.”
Another foreshadowing. In addition to sort of laying the blocks of Sophos' identity, this is something that, in light of Ambiades' dual loyalties, sticks out especially on re-read.
Finally, on Hamiathes' stone, Gen asks about the pertinent political question: there are skeptics. What if they bring it back and none of the people in power believe? They might just say no. Gen mentions that "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." And the magus answers: she is a queen. She can never be easy on her throne. "No woman could be." Even if this is a completely spurious reason and most people think the stone is a myth, someone can use it as leverage to say she's not qualified. This is something that resonates across all the novels - and Attolia is this personified. Her whole reign, her whole external persona, even her internal outlook, is warped by this. She seizes power partly because she's underestimated because of her gender, and then she manipulates Nahuseresh with this too. Her barons have already learned better, but she can't consolidate her rule because ironically, they feel she's not strong enough. Even Eddis, who is free of the backbiting and simmering rebellion of Attolia's barons, actually feels this too - she wears dresses that squeeze her, and feels she's letting down her people by not being beautiful while running her country. At the very end of the story, when we learn that Gen's father basically told him (wordlessly) to find the stone himself and bring it back, seems to suggest that Eddis' government is aware of the possibility/threat that Sounis using the stone to unseat Eddis, and afraid it might work.
Chapter 5 begins with one of the stories within the stories - one of my favourite parts of the novels. The Earth's Creation and Birth of Gods is a quintessential origin story - the sort that every culture has, and which cleverly gives personification and thus human reasons for natural events. The personifications of Earth and Sky have very human emotions of jealousy and anger, vanity for the Sky and pity from Earth for the humans.
More interesting than the story itself, though, is the critique that Gen gives afterward. We learn how Eddis is supposed to be pronounced! (And the how the people of Eddis say it, not the exonym.) He says a lot of it has been left out, like the crying that leads to salt lakes. And the magus replies that his version is authoritative, that there's lots of versions, but he's collected a lot for a long time and thinks his are definitive. Personally, this has always been a bugbear of mine, the idea of authenticity = better, but it also raises the interesting issue of how difficult it is to disentangle the many different iterations of a story (and there are lots, if it's popular enough to survive so long!) to find what the "first" one must have been like.
And then it leads to this. I don't even need to comment:
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.”
Pol and Sophos have a conversation - probably the most we hear from Pol. They're easy and companiable with each other, though Sophos is much chattier than Pol. Despite this easiness, there's not a lot of background to glean from the conversation - information on where they're going (Attolia), but mostly just some character building, especially for Pol, who is pretty silent. Sophos and Gen's conversation actually gives us background on Gen, which is a lot harder to come by. We know he's not illegitimate (and that apparently all of them assumed he was, if Sophos' reaction is anything to go by) and we even get the name of one of his brothers, Stenides.
This quote about his sisters intrigues me:
As Sophos pulled ahead, I said loudly, “My sisters are even married, and honest housewives to boot.” At least they were mostly honest.
Are they too slightly thief-y? Or the usual sibling thing?
More hints about Ambiades' uncomfortable position as spy. I don't think he's been to Attolia or looked the information up himself, but in the same way that once you notice something you can't stop noticing it afterward, all the facts about Attolia probably stuck in his head after he agreed to spy.
“They export wine, figs, olives, and grapes as well as cereals. They have pastureland to support their own cattle, and they don’t import sheep from Eddis,” Ambiades said knowledgeably, and the magus laughed.
“Gods, you were paying attention!”
I thought at first that Ambiades was going to smile, but he scowled instead and didn’t speak until we stopped for the night, and then it was only to berate Sophos.
Then Gen tells the story about The Birth of Eugenides, God of Thieves. Interestingly the rule of threes seems to be in play (Earth visits three times before they're ready, nine days, do you have a cradle, clothing, and blankets, etc.) I also love the toys that Earth gives him - toys with a little twist on them.
I love this quote. I think it's because it is like one of the little homilies that get added in these kind of stories:
And the Earth had no name. The gods know themselves and have no need of names. It is man who names all things, even gods.
In Chapter 6 they make it out of the steep, mountainous Eddis and into Attolia, into the Sea of Olives. The magus leaves to get supplies, and Sophos and Ambiades fence for a bit, with a bit of Gen's internal commentary. Even after knowing how very good Gen is with a sword - not only here but especially in The King of Attolia - it's still hard to see any hint of it here. Gen really just gives a pretty dry description, though he does see Ambiades' skill is from years of fencing instruction.
When they all go to wash I love the commentary about the cloaks. Lots and lots of hints about Ambiades.
Ambiades stood up and dropped his cloak beside the others on the stream bank. It lay next to Sophos’s and made a very poor showing. The other cloaks were well made but ordinary. Mine was probably one of the magus’s old ones cut down, and Pol’s was a plain military cloak, but Sophos’s was a particularly fine specimen, made of expensive fabric generously cut with a stylish silk tassel hanging from the hem at the back. Beside it, the narrow cut of Ambiades’s cloak was flashy but out of fashion, and there was a line of holes, poorly darned, that ran from neck to hem, where a moth had been eating it during its summer storage.
That, and the fact that Ambiades knocks down Gen when he's called Lord of Rags and Tatters. More interestingly, we learn that Ambiades was born into a once very wealthy and influential but completely disgraced family - his grandfather the duke who had conspired to overthrow the oligarcy. It's interesting that Sophos says the grandfather "tried to return the oligarchy and was executed", because Sounis certainly seems to be a monarchy. However, information about Sounis is rather thinner on the ground, and it's hard to insert it, because 3/4 of the characters are Sounisian and the other 1/4 is pretending to be Sounisian. They're not likely to engage in a 101-level political science discussion about Sounis.
Chaper 6 is a lot of sneaking through the Sea of Olives. I assume they can only get away with this because it's so thinly settled now, though they do avoid roads and travel at night; the olives were grown to be harvested, so they were probably planted at regular distances, though then again, without regular upkeep they'd probably start seeding the area in between anyway. It does make me wonder about the old king, the last Eddis who held the stone - why did he hide it in Attolia? It's not an easy place to get to as an Eddis citizen, especially if you want to get there secretly, especially since the stone is a very useful political tool/symbol. Was the king so afraid that it would be found? Did he want the inheritance to go normally, but didn't want to destroy it outright?
There's also another story in this chapter: Eugenides and the Sky God's Thunderbolts. Probably this is the story that starts the idea that Eugenides is the patron of thieves. I like that the thunderbolts are physical artifacts - in fact I sort of vaguely imagine them as arrows. And here is the making of Hephestia, who is the strongest of all the gods except the first. She is given more prominence, like Zeus is over the original Gaia etc.
Eugenides first went home to his mother and asked for the moleskin blanket that had covered him as a baby. He took the blanket to Olcthemenes, the tailor, and asked him to make a suit from it, both a tunic and leggings, and Olcthemenes, the tailor, did.
That is a very big baby blanket! I do like that the stories have a bit of a fairytale feel about them. Eugenides begs from each bird a single feather, and turns that into a camouflaged hat. At least he went with thrushes, which are mostly brownish.
On one last note: they eat all sorts of things, but I'm interested that they eat bread and cheese, coffee. Earlier in the first inn, they actually eat butter and honey on top of the oatmeal. There are interesting divisions in eating habits across Europe, which are sometimes divided south/north by olive oil vs butter, wine vs beer. I think Turner is just mixing in a lot of different foods that are available to us today - there's coffee from the new world and Ambiades is quizzed on the characteristics of the eucalyptus vs the olive. Thoughts?
Stay tuned for the next instalment next week, hosted by an_english_girl, for chapters 7-9!
Like all the readalongs - SPOILERS! I'll also talk a little bit about the other books, so be wary if you haven't read them yet.
Chapter 4 continues with the travel, but these few chapters are really interesting because they are where Turner starts giving hints about what's happening, who the various characters are and what they're like, and of course, the background of Eddis, Sounis and Attolia with the old stories. One of the best parts of re-reading is picking up the clues that seemed just like the usual filler, or just descriptive phrases. It's all there if you know what to look for!
Chapter 4 has a lot of interaction between Gen, Sophos, Ambiades, and the magus. (Pol's kind of quiet generally.) The magus quizzes his two apprentices, and Ambiades veers mostly between extremely irritable and OK, while Sophos seems knowledgeable but defers totally to Ambiades. Gen makes himself a thorn in the magus' side. The quizzing is also an excellent way to frame information about the world - not only physical geography and biology (like the trees!) but also about the countries' shared history, their current views on each other, the way their cultures clash.
And of course, when they make camp, the magus finally reveals what they're after, one of my favourite lines of the book:
“Do you mean,” I squawked, “that we are out here in the dark looking for something from a fairy tale?”
From what Sophos recites ("So Sophos recited what he knew while we ate our lunch. Eddis was ruled by a queen and a court of eleven ministers, including a prime minister...") we find out a lot about Eddis. Not only about her government - mostly a monarchy - but also that it controls the only passes between Sounis and Attolia, which give it a lot more power than its tininess and its reliance on the imports of food suggest. Sophos gives a fairly factual description, with the sort of trivia you might find in a book about a country - thus the comment about All About Our Neighbours, which I thought made an interesting not-Greek flavour. (Turner has mentioned in the notes that she never intended Eddis et al to be the ancient world, what with the guns and the watches and the coffee. Little details like that are peppered throughout.) But back to the three countries: interestingly, it is Ambiades who gives the information about the passes and how that gives Eddis political power, and the power to shape the three countries' history; they closed the passes to keep Sounis from invading. This is also a tactic that will be used later on, in the war - if necessary Eddis can destroy her own roads and bridges, and prevent anyone from crossing. Ambiades is quick on the questions with power and influence and generally, but he is indifferent at the history and natural history parts.
“And do you know if that has always been true?”
Ambiades shrugged. “Since the invaders.”
He's certainly not stupid, but he's impatient and doesn't care about things he thinks is unnecessary.
Wrapped in the discussion about Hamiathes' stone is the way it's taken on the air of myth. One of the great things about The Thief is the worldbuilding that is facilitated through these stories. These build-ups of myth reflect our own history in the real world - most students in the western world end up learning about the Greco-Roman myths, and this riffs off those especially. The association gives this world a much greater depth. Turner can drop in a quick reference to Zeus and Hera, without even naming names, and the reader can fill in the rest; and given how rich that mythology is, it really makes the world much more fleshed out.
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?”
Gen treats the story of Hamiathes (at least externally) as a myth, and that, too, simultaneously makes him like us - enjoy it on a story level, don't believe in real life - and also quite like most fantasy protagonists, who are often skeptical of prophecies, myths, and their quests.
Another interesting thing I like about the little excerpt is the mention of the invaders. It's mentioned elsewhere, too; that the more fertile, coastal countries of Attolia and Sounis were conquered long ago, and it seems that while the invaders eventually were assimilated or driven away, they made lasting changes to their host countries' religions - always a hard, slow thing to change. This invasion and change in religion makes Eddis, who stayed clear, seem like a bit of a curious relic to the other two countries - they still worship (if not believe) the old gods. It also gives the three countries some history. It's not a culture that has stayed unchanging over a thousand years.
Sophos shook his head. “My father thinks that we should forget the old gods. He says that a country with two sets of gods is like a country with two kings. No one knows which to be loyal to.”
Another foreshadowing. In addition to sort of laying the blocks of Sophos' identity, this is something that, in light of Ambiades' dual loyalties, sticks out especially on re-read.
Finally, on Hamiathes' stone, Gen asks about the pertinent political question: there are skeptics. What if they bring it back and none of the people in power believe? They might just say no. Gen mentions that "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." And the magus answers: she is a queen. She can never be easy on her throne. "No woman could be." Even if this is a completely spurious reason and most people think the stone is a myth, someone can use it as leverage to say she's not qualified. This is something that resonates across all the novels - and Attolia is this personified. Her whole reign, her whole external persona, even her internal outlook, is warped by this. She seizes power partly because she's underestimated because of her gender, and then she manipulates Nahuseresh with this too. Her barons have already learned better, but she can't consolidate her rule because ironically, they feel she's not strong enough. Even Eddis, who is free of the backbiting and simmering rebellion of Attolia's barons, actually feels this too - she wears dresses that squeeze her, and feels she's letting down her people by not being beautiful while running her country. At the very end of the story, when we learn that Gen's father basically told him (wordlessly) to find the stone himself and bring it back, seems to suggest that Eddis' government is aware of the possibility/threat that Sounis using the stone to unseat Eddis, and afraid it might work.
Chapter 5 begins with one of the stories within the stories - one of my favourite parts of the novels. The Earth's Creation and Birth of Gods is a quintessential origin story - the sort that every culture has, and which cleverly gives personification and thus human reasons for natural events. The personifications of Earth and Sky have very human emotions of jealousy and anger, vanity for the Sky and pity from Earth for the humans.
More interesting than the story itself, though, is the critique that Gen gives afterward. We learn how Eddis is supposed to be pronounced! (And the how the people of Eddis say it, not the exonym.) He says a lot of it has been left out, like the crying that leads to salt lakes. And the magus replies that his version is authoritative, that there's lots of versions, but he's collected a lot for a long time and thinks his are definitive. Personally, this has always been a bugbear of mine, the idea of authenticity = better, but it also raises the interesting issue of how difficult it is to disentangle the many different iterations of a story (and there are lots, if it's popular enough to survive so long!) to find what the "first" one must have been like.
And then it leads to this. I don't even need to comment:
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.”
Pol and Sophos have a conversation - probably the most we hear from Pol. They're easy and companiable with each other, though Sophos is much chattier than Pol. Despite this easiness, there's not a lot of background to glean from the conversation - information on where they're going (Attolia), but mostly just some character building, especially for Pol, who is pretty silent. Sophos and Gen's conversation actually gives us background on Gen, which is a lot harder to come by. We know he's not illegitimate (and that apparently all of them assumed he was, if Sophos' reaction is anything to go by) and we even get the name of one of his brothers, Stenides.
This quote about his sisters intrigues me:
As Sophos pulled ahead, I said loudly, “My sisters are even married, and honest housewives to boot.” At least they were mostly honest.
Are they too slightly thief-y? Or the usual sibling thing?
More hints about Ambiades' uncomfortable position as spy. I don't think he's been to Attolia or looked the information up himself, but in the same way that once you notice something you can't stop noticing it afterward, all the facts about Attolia probably stuck in his head after he agreed to spy.
“They export wine, figs, olives, and grapes as well as cereals. They have pastureland to support their own cattle, and they don’t import sheep from Eddis,” Ambiades said knowledgeably, and the magus laughed.
“Gods, you were paying attention!”
I thought at first that Ambiades was going to smile, but he scowled instead and didn’t speak until we stopped for the night, and then it was only to berate Sophos.
Then Gen tells the story about The Birth of Eugenides, God of Thieves. Interestingly the rule of threes seems to be in play (Earth visits three times before they're ready, nine days, do you have a cradle, clothing, and blankets, etc.) I also love the toys that Earth gives him - toys with a little twist on them.
I love this quote. I think it's because it is like one of the little homilies that get added in these kind of stories:
And the Earth had no name. The gods know themselves and have no need of names. It is man who names all things, even gods.
In Chapter 6 they make it out of the steep, mountainous Eddis and into Attolia, into the Sea of Olives. The magus leaves to get supplies, and Sophos and Ambiades fence for a bit, with a bit of Gen's internal commentary. Even after knowing how very good Gen is with a sword - not only here but especially in The King of Attolia - it's still hard to see any hint of it here. Gen really just gives a pretty dry description, though he does see Ambiades' skill is from years of fencing instruction.
When they all go to wash I love the commentary about the cloaks. Lots and lots of hints about Ambiades.
Ambiades stood up and dropped his cloak beside the others on the stream bank. It lay next to Sophos’s and made a very poor showing. The other cloaks were well made but ordinary. Mine was probably one of the magus’s old ones cut down, and Pol’s was a plain military cloak, but Sophos’s was a particularly fine specimen, made of expensive fabric generously cut with a stylish silk tassel hanging from the hem at the back. Beside it, the narrow cut of Ambiades’s cloak was flashy but out of fashion, and there was a line of holes, poorly darned, that ran from neck to hem, where a moth had been eating it during its summer storage.
That, and the fact that Ambiades knocks down Gen when he's called Lord of Rags and Tatters. More interestingly, we learn that Ambiades was born into a once very wealthy and influential but completely disgraced family - his grandfather the duke who had conspired to overthrow the oligarcy. It's interesting that Sophos says the grandfather "tried to return the oligarchy and was executed", because Sounis certainly seems to be a monarchy. However, information about Sounis is rather thinner on the ground, and it's hard to insert it, because 3/4 of the characters are Sounisian and the other 1/4 is pretending to be Sounisian. They're not likely to engage in a 101-level political science discussion about Sounis.
Chaper 6 is a lot of sneaking through the Sea of Olives. I assume they can only get away with this because it's so thinly settled now, though they do avoid roads and travel at night; the olives were grown to be harvested, so they were probably planted at regular distances, though then again, without regular upkeep they'd probably start seeding the area in between anyway. It does make me wonder about the old king, the last Eddis who held the stone - why did he hide it in Attolia? It's not an easy place to get to as an Eddis citizen, especially if you want to get there secretly, especially since the stone is a very useful political tool/symbol. Was the king so afraid that it would be found? Did he want the inheritance to go normally, but didn't want to destroy it outright?
There's also another story in this chapter: Eugenides and the Sky God's Thunderbolts. Probably this is the story that starts the idea that Eugenides is the patron of thieves. I like that the thunderbolts are physical artifacts - in fact I sort of vaguely imagine them as arrows. And here is the making of Hephestia, who is the strongest of all the gods except the first. She is given more prominence, like Zeus is over the original Gaia etc.
Eugenides first went home to his mother and asked for the moleskin blanket that had covered him as a baby. He took the blanket to Olcthemenes, the tailor, and asked him to make a suit from it, both a tunic and leggings, and Olcthemenes, the tailor, did.
That is a very big baby blanket! I do like that the stories have a bit of a fairytale feel about them. Eugenides begs from each bird a single feather, and turns that into a camouflaged hat. At least he went with thrushes, which are mostly brownish.
On one last note: they eat all sorts of things, but I'm interested that they eat bread and cheese, coffee. Earlier in the first inn, they actually eat butter and honey on top of the oatmeal. There are interesting divisions in eating habits across Europe, which are sometimes divided south/north by olive oil vs butter, wine vs beer. I think Turner is just mixing in a lot of different foods that are available to us today - there's coffee from the new world and Ambiades is quizzed on the characteristics of the eucalyptus vs the olive. Thoughts?
Stay tuned for the next instalment next week, hosted by an_english_girl, for chapters 7-9!