Every Inch a King Read online

Another Shqipetar came out, this one a good deal younger and sprier. He bowed to me, then to Essad Pasha, and then to Max. That done, he began a chant of a sort I’d run into before. The language was different, but the rhythms were the same as the ones I heard whenever I put to sea. Eliphalet fry me for sheep’s wool if he wasn’t a weatherworker.

  He knew his trade, too. He wasn’t as good as Stagiros, but who is? He was plenty good enough to send a strong breeze wafting northward.

  Why he was wafting a strong breeze northward, I couldn’t have said. Essad Pasha could, and did: “We’d better take cover, your Highness. The dragons will scent blood soon.”

  “Oh,” I said after a pause that, if not pregnant, was certainly out long past its bedtime. Everyone hears stories about how keen dragons’ noses are. In the days when knighthood was in flower, knights would have smelled even more like fertilizer than they did anyway if they hadn’t bathed before they hunted dragons. Their ladies, no doubt, would have appreciated that more if they’d bathed very often themselves. But foul hide seldom won fierce dragon, as someone probably didn’t say.

  Still…Those dragons fluttering around that peak had to be miles away. Could a weatherworker send the scent of one sheep’s blood that far? Now that you mention it, yes. Watching, I could tell exactly when thoughts of courtship ended and thoughts of breakfast began. It was when the dragons started flying straight toward me.

  “I really think we ought to take cover, your Highness,” Max said, in lieu of screaming, If we run for our lives now, maybe the dragon will eat the sheep instead of us.

  A lot of what gets called courage is fear of looking like a coward in front of other people. Soldiers mostly don’t go forward because they’re wild to slaughter the bastards on the other side. They know the bastards on the other side are getting it in the neck from their generals, the same as they are themselves. But they don’t want to let their pals down, and they don’t want to be seen letting their pals down. Death before embarrassment! may not sound like an earth-shaking motto, but it’s won more battles than Eliphalet and no quarter! I ought to know. I’m no braver than I have to be; the proof is, I never had the nerve to run away.

  And so, instead of doing what any sensible human being would do with several dragons bearing down on him-which is to say, vacating the premises as fast as ever I could-I hunkered down behind some boulders that would have done fine as cover against crossbowmen but were essentially useless against anything that could flame from above. They call this sport. I have another name for it-several other names, in fact. The mild ones are hotter than dragonfire. They go up from there.

  “You have the privilege of the first shot, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

  I was proud of myself. All I said was, “Thanks.”

  One thing did go right in the next few minutes. Between their mountain and ours, the dragons had a disagreement about who would eat the sheep they’d scented. Being dragons, they settled it by fighting. People would have formed committees and alliances and taken much longer to come to the same conclusion: the largest, meanest one got to do what he wanted, while the rest flew off dreaming of being the largest, meanest one the next time they smelled something good to eat.

  The winner was an impressive beast, silvery below and a metallic blue-green above. His wings were the wings a bat might have if a bat were the size of a dragon. The size of a big dragon, I should say-this fellow was to dragons as Max is to ordinary mortals. I wished I hadn’t thought of it quite that way; it made me feel much too ordinarily mortal myself.

  As the dragon drew closer, I got a good look at his red, glowing eyes. What I saw there was a nasty blend of raw hunger and old sin. I looked over to my left to make sure Essad Pasha hadn’t suddenly sprouted wings. But no, there he sprawled beside me. What I saw in his eyes was a nasty blend of raw nerves and old sin. We could kill the dragon. Oh, yes. But the dragon could kill us, too. And the closer it got, the more forcefully it reminded me of that.

  “Soon, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

  Much too soon, I thought, but no help for it. If I didn’t try to shoot the great worm, I would be reckoned a coward till I got flamed and eaten-a brief but unpleasant interval. If I shot and missed, I would be reckoned a thumbfingered dunderhead till I got flamed and eaten-a brief interval that also left something to be desired. There was one other possibility-if I could bring it off.

  When I popped up from behind the boulders, the wind from the dragon’s wings all but knocked me off my feet. He was a weatherworker of sorts himself. He was also wise in the ways of men. He wouldn’t have grown to that size without being hunted before.

  His head swung toward me. His great jaws fell open. He was going to flame. He was going to, but I squeezed the trigger first.

  That cursed crossbow came closer to knocking me off my feet than the dragonwind had. Any crossbow worth the name will kick. You don’t shoot a bolt without its pushing back at you. This miserable weapon shot an extra heavy bolt, and shot it especially hard. I felt as if a mule or a Shqipetar or some other stubborn creature with hard feet had booted me in the shoulder.

  As I staggered back, Essad Pasha and Max sprang to their feet. They were going to do what they could to keep me breathing so they could call me a thumbfingered dunderhead at their leisure. When I didn’t hear their crossbows snap, I thought we were all doomed.

  Then Essad Pasha cried, “Well shot, your Highness! Oh, well shot!” He threw himself into my arms and kissed me on both cheeks.

  I recovered my balance and tried to recover from Essad Pasha. The dragon was thrashing its life away on the mountainside. It never even got a taste of the sheep. I hadn’t seen where my quarrel hit. I still couldn’t see where it had hit.

  “Right down the throat,” Max said, sounding more than suitably impressed. Considering what he knew of right down the throat, I liked his accolade better than Essad Pasha’s kisses.

  “In my time, I have seen many marvelous things,” Essad Pasha said, though his eyes denied it. He went on, “I don’t believe I have ever seen anything to match a dragon slain so. People will talk of this for the next hundred years. North and south, east and west, they will.”

  I’d come to Shqiperi to give people things more interesting to talk about than any mere dragon. Telling Essad Pasha as much, though, struck me as…inexpedient. Instead, I waved toward the dragon as if I’d practiced that shot for years and brought it off twice a day in Vyzance. “Let’s wait till it stops wiggling, and then we’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “Just as you say, your Highness, so shall it be.” Essad Pasha was eating out of my hand now. A less attractive picture would be hard to imagine. I surreptitiously wiped my palm against my trouser leg.

  Waiting for a dragon to die takes almost as much patience as waiting for Dooger and Cark to smile while they pay back wages. I wondered whether the other flying worms would pay us a call while this one perished, but they kept their distance. Maybe the scent of its death agonies reached them and persuaded them they might do well to shop at another meat market.

  Slowly, slowly, the fire in the dragon’s eyes went out. I hoped the same held true for the fire in its belly. Its blood smoked on the ground. When at last it lay still, I stepped out from behind the sheltering boulders. Essad Pasha and Max followed my lead.

  As I walked past one of those smoking patches, I stooped and dipped my finger in the dragon’s blood. “What are you doing, your Highness?” Essad Pasha asked, curiously but respectfully.

  Max’s cough was anything but respectful. Witte is a Schlepsigian grand duchy; he’d grown up on the same legends I had. Who doesn’t remember the story of What’s-his-name, the fellow they made the opera about, who tasted dragon’s blood and could suddenly understand the speech of birds and beasts?

  The dragon’s blood was burning my finger. “Just-wondering,” I told Essad Pasha, who’d grown up on a different set of legends. I brushed my finger against my mouth. The dragon’s blood burned my lips and tongue, too. I didn�
��t hear any squeaky or hissy or chirpy voices.

  I’ll never go to that opera again. A vole or a starling probably hasn’t got anything interesting to say anyhow.

  “Take a trophy, your Highness,” Essad Pasha urged as we walked up to the enormous, twisted corpse. A trophy? I wondered. In Leon, they fight bulls. They don’t give the bulls swords, so the fights aren’t what you’d call even, but they do fight them. And if the human fighter (the killer, he’s called in Leonese, an uncommonly honest language) does well, they award him the bull’s ears and its tail, those being its most useless parts. (I don’t know what they give a bull that kills its man-his brains, probably.)

  Dragons have no ears. This one did have a tail, of course, but it was about three times as long as Max. I drew my belt knife and worried off one of the metallic blue-green upper scales. It was not quite the size of the hand Essad Pasha was eating out of (I wished that hadn’t occurred to me). I held it out to him, saying, “Have a mount set in the back of this. I will wear it over my heart henceforward, in memory of the day.” Insults aren’t the only place where Hassocki overwrite their dialogue.

  He bowed as low as his years and his belly would let him. “It shall be as you say, your Highness,” he told me.

  I’d heard things like that more often since coming to Shqiperi than in my whole life before then. I knew exactly what that meant. It meant I should have decided to become a king a long time ago.

  Instead of feeding the dragon, that sheep gave us supper. Fried mutton again, with fried parsnips to go with it. They didn’t fry the wool; I will say that for them. They didn’t fry the coffee, either. I wonder why not. Because they hadn’t thought of it, I suppose. If a copy of my tale ever gets back to Shqiperi, it may give them ideas.

  Just what they need.

  We didn’t drink so deep as we had the night before. Two debauches like that in a row, and I think Essad Pasha could have donated his liver to medical magecraft. As things were, he kept praising me. “I’ve never seen a shot like that,” he said. “Never, not in all my hunts. Never heard of one like that, either. North and south, east and west, I don’t think anybody’s ever heard of one like that.”

  I was modest. “Nothing to it,” I said.

  He choked on his liquid fire. Max almost did, but not quite. But then, Max has heard me before. Essad Pasha was still getting used to his new sovereign. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we go on to Peshkepiia for your coronation.”

  “The harem is arranged, then?” I hoped I didn’t sound too eager.

  “Your Highness, it is,” Essad Pasha assured me, “and I apologize again for the delay. In a way, it’s almost a pity. I’d like to see that shot again.”

  So would I, I thought: one more thing Essad Pasha didn’t need to know.

  I was getting out of my clothes and into my nightshirt when a scrawny cat wandered into the bedroom. The shooting box was full of mice. Several cats ambled through it. If they didn’t catch mice, they didn’t eat. They were all on the skinny side, as if to say, I’d rather be free than work hard. Cats are cats, all over the world.

  This one gave me a green-eyed stare and said, “Call you a king? Ha! Not likely!”

  I heaved a boot at it. Even a cat may look at a king, but the proverb doesn’t say one thing about badmouthing him.

  We rode for Peshkepiia, all five syllables of it, the next morning. The horses didn’t have a thing to say. Maybe I’d imagined the snide crack from the cat the night before. Maybe I had-except I hadn’t. I could still feel the sting of the dragon’s blood on my lips and tongue.

  When the fellow in the legends heard animals talk, they told him things he needed to hear. What did I get? Some mouse-breathed, mangy feline with an overblown sense of its own importance. (Is there any other kind of cat? Give me leave to doubt it.) Just my luck.

  If the horses were quiet, Essad Pasha wasn’t. He kept going on about what a splendid coronation it would be and how many diplomats would be there from the great powers and the powers that wished they were great. Listening to that was a lot more pleasant than getting the glove from a cream-stealing tabby.

  We rode into a village at midmorning. Essad Pasha shouted to the locals in Hassocki. “Do you speak Shqipetari?” I asked him.

  He looked at me as if I’d asked him if he ate with his fingers. No-he looked at me as if I’d asked him if he picked his nose and then ate with his fingers. “Those barbarous gruntings and mooings and fartings? I should hope not!” he said, sounding as insulted as the cat about my becoming king.

  Still…“If I’m to rule them, I suppose I ought to learn to talk with them in their own language,” I said.

  “Suit yourself, your Highness. I’ve ruled them for years, and I never did.” Pride clanged in Essad Pasha’s voice. “I rule. They are ruled. Let them learn my speech.”

  These Shqipetari, at least, understood Hassocki and spoke it well enough. One of them led us to the village square. That was a lovely little place, shaded by plum and pear trees, with a fountain laughing in the middle of it and one of the Quadrate God’s low, modest shrines off to one side. Men with bushy mustaches and spotless white headscarves sat on backless benches and drank coffee from a shop by the temple-you could smell the roasting beans-and passed the amber mouthpieces of water pipes from one to the next. Unsanitary, yes, but charming.

  Our guide found a bench for us. Then he shouted in Shqipetari. A woman fetched us black bread and honey and yogurt with fruit stirred into it (a Hassocki dish originally, now it’s popular all through the Nekemte Peninsula) and small cups of Hassocki-style coffee and even smaller cups of brandy distilled from plums and lightning. Nothing fried. I could hardly believe it.

  The locals already in the square let us eat in peace, proving they’d never had anything to do with scribes. Only after the woman had taken away the tray on which she’d brought our lunch did one of them approach us. He looked like a bandit who’d done well enough at his trade to retire from it at a fairly early age, and stood waiting with dignity for me to acknowledge him.

  I nodded, I hoped politely. “You wish?” I asked.

  “You will be king? King of all Shqiperi?” By the way he said it, all Shqiperi might have been a great and grand place, not a couple of wrinkles on the Nekemte Peninsula’s hairy backside.

  Max coughed. I knew what that meant. The villager, fortunately, didn’t. I nodded again. “That’s so, yes.”

  He looked me up and down. His eyes were as hard and shiny and unwinking as a bird of prey’s. “By what right should you be king?”

  Max coughed again, this time in some alarm. Essad Pasha growled like an angry bear. I held up a hand and murmured to him. He raised an elegantly pruned eyebrow, then reached into his belt pouch and handed me the dragon scale. I held it up so the Shqipetar could see exactly what it was. He still didn’t blink, but those hard, dark eyes widened a hair’s breadth. “By this right,” I told him as I rose from the bench. “And by this right as well.” I flipped forward and started walking on my hands.

  He hadn’t expected that. He said something harsh in his own language, then went back to Hassocki: “North and south, east and west, why do you do such an undignified thing?”

  “To show you I will turn Shqiperi upside down if I have to, to make this kingdom go the way it should.” From my own upside-down vantage point, I saw all the men in the square gawking at me. A man who would be king sitting around drinking coffee and brandy was one thing. A man who would be king waving his boots in the air was something else entirely.

  I bounced to my feet again. This takes a push with the arms and a snap of the legs-and a deal of practice as well, with luck on a soft mat. You will fall the first time you try it, and the fifth, and probably the tenth, too. But once you have it down, it’s a striking effect. I brushed my dirty palms on my trouser legs.

  “You are…not an ordinary prince,” the Shqipetar said.

  “Indeed not.” I struck a pose. “I am an extraordinary prince, a much superior type.” Max coughed aga
in, but I can’t for the life of me fathom why. In all the history of the world, has there ever been a prince more extraordinary than I?

  If I hadn’t convinced the Shqipetar, I’d confused him, which often serves just as well. He bowed and withdrew, as one might withdraw from the presence of a large and possibly dangerous animal. I smiled after him. For some reason, that only made him withdraw faster.

  In a low voice, Essad Pasha said, “I didn’t know you could do that, your Highness.”

  I smiled at him, too. “Well, your Excellency, now you do,” I said. Let him make whatever he pleased of that. He didn’t make anything of it, which pleased me.

  The prosperous ruffian who’d come up to take my measure sat down with his cronies and started talking. Every so often, he would look over toward me. I always knew when he did, and was never looking in his direction then. There is a knack to keeping an eye on people without letting them know you’re doing it. I had the knack. He didn’t. The more he talked, the more impressed he seemed. I smiled once more, this time only to myself.

  After that, my party rode on toward Peshkepiia, the capital from which I would rule Shqiperi. More than one traveler from Peshkepiia to Fushe-Kuqe, seeing so many armed men riding toward him, took us for a bandit troop and fled. More than one herdsman in the fields and meadows did the same.

  That made Essad Pasha smile. “Already fear of your might goes before you, your Highness,” he said.

  “Only evildoers should fear me,” I said, and glared so hard at Max that he didn’t let out a peep.

  I puzzled Essad Pasha, who said, “But, your Highness, anyone who opposes you is an evildoer by the very nature of things.”

  Anyone who opposes you is an evildoer-not because I was always right, but because I was always king. No wonder kings get an exaggerated sense of their own importance. Anyone who opposes you… Yes, I liked that as much as any other king would have.

  With the sun setting ahead of us, Essad Pasha pointed to the city its golden rays illuminated. “There is Peshkepiia, your Highness. May your rule be long and glorious.”