Every Inch a King Read online

  “I tried,” he said morosely. “Little bastard gave me the slip. It’s his town, and it isn’t mine. What are we going to do, O sage of the age? I mean, besides getting our heads cut off and spears rammed up our backsides, probably not in that order?”

  I had to think fast. I took another slug of brandy. Maybe it would lubricate my wits. If it didn’t, maybe I wouldn’t care. Something worked in there. “It’s a lie,” I told Max.

  “What’s a lie? That the Atabeg sent the message? That Essad Pasha’s cursed well got it? Don’t I wish it was, your Majesty.” Max made my title positively poisonous. “I was there, I tell you.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said impatiently. “There’s a real message, but it’s a real lie, too.”

  “In a pig’s posterior!” Max said. “You’re as much a Hassocki prince as I am a camel.”

  “The way you’ve been humping the last two nights, you might be,” I said. “Shut up and listen to me. The Hassockian Atabeg has to deny that I’m really his nephew-even though I am, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” Max gives the most disagreeable agreement I’ve ever known.

  I ignored him. It’s not easy, but I have practice. “He has to deny that I’m Halim Eddin. What just happened to the Hassockian Empire? It just got the snot kicked out of it in the Nekemte Wars. If it hadn’t, Shqiperi wouldn’t be a kingdom. It would still be a Hassocki province, right?”

  “I suppose so,” Max said. “But what’s that got to do with-”

  I went right on ignoring him. Brandy helps. “Listen, I tell you. The Hassocki tried to sneak a fast one past their neighbors and the Great Powers by sending me here. I’m their stalking horse. I’m the key to their holding on to influence in the eastern part of the Nekemte Peninsula.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Max said. “I knew it all along. You really are.”

  “You’re just jealous,” I said, which had the distinct virtue of making him shut up. That accomplished, I went on, “What other choice have we got? We’ve jumped on the dragon-we can’t let go of its ears now.”

  “Of course we can’t. Dragons haven’t got ears. And you haven’t got any brains.”

  “This is not the time to revoke my poetic license. You know what I mean,” I said. “What do we do if this crystal message from Vyzance isn’t a stinking lie, eh? Do we paste on sheepish grins and go, ‘Sorry, we were just playing a little joke on you people. I guess we’ll be running along now’?”

  “Don’t I wish!” Max exclaimed. “I’d love to. Only thing is, I don’t think Essad Pasha’s laughing right now.”

  I didn’t think so, either. Essad Pasha is one of those people who will laugh till the tears come while he’s watching his enemies’ beards burn after he’s soaked them in oil and touched a match to them. His sense of humor does go that far. When it comes to seeing a joke on himself, though…“If you want to live to spend any of the money in the treasury, if you don’t want to wind up envying Rexhep-”

  “What’s the eunuch got to do with it?” Max broke in.

  “Well, for one thing, if they find out we’re just a couple of performers from Schlepsig, they may want to cut our balls off on general principles,” I said. “But they may not need general principles, not when they’ve got specific ones. How many Shqipetari maidens have you debauched the past two nights?”

  “Debauched, my left one. They loved every minute of it.” But Max looked worried about his left one, and his right one, too.

  “To the Shqipetari, that only makes things worse. They aren’t supposed to enjoy it here. You’re not supposed to enjoy anything here except the cursed blood feuds.” Now that I think on things, that made Essad Pasha a pretty fair governor for Shqiperi, didn’t it? I had more urgent worries just then, or I would have seen it sooner. I went on, “So that message has to be a lie. The best thing we can do is make everyone think it is. The worst we can do is buy some time.”

  “Time to get out of here,” Max said. “Eliphalet’s beard, it is time to get out of here!”

  “Don’t talk about Eliphalet, even in Hassocki,” I told him. That proved good advice, because a moment later someone knocked on the door. Max jumped like a cornered sword-swallower pretending to be an aide-de-camp to a cornered acrobat pretending to be a king. Quite a bit like that, in fact. As calmly as he could, the cornered actor pretending to be a king opened the door. There stood Skander, not pretending to be a majordomo-and not even knowing he was cornering us. “Yes?” I said-regally.

  “Excuse me, your Majesty, but his Excellency Essad Pasha is here. He would like to see you for a moment,” Skander said.

  Max didn’t jump again, but he definitely twitched. Skander already suspected my minister for special affairs of being in two places at once. Now Max seemed not to want to be any place at all. I felt a certain sympathy for that; I didn’t much want to be any place in Peshkepiia myself. But if I had to be any place in Peshkepiia, the palace was the best one.

  “Tell his Excellency I will meet him in the throne room in a quarter of an hour,” I said. Skander bowed and scurried away.

  You’d be surprised how much brandy you can drink in fifteen minutes. Or maybe you wouldn’t, in which case the Two Prophets have mercy on your liver.

  At the appointed time, I sat myself down on the cheap, tawdry throne. The two-headed Shqipetari eagle (made in Albion) hung on the wall in back of me, looking symbolic or absurd, depending on your attitude toward such things. Behind me and to the left of the throne stood the mostly faithful Max, otherwise Captain Yildirim, otherwise my new minister for special affairs.

  If Max swayed as he stood there, if my eyes were glassy, you can blame the fifteen minutes just past. And if Max seemed steady enough, if I looked the way I usually do-well, you can blame a lot of other sessions with a lot of other jugs and bottles. In which case, the Two Prophets have mercy on our livers.

  “His Excellency, Essad Pasha!” Skander cried, as if the Kingdom of Shqiperi were as venerable as Albion or the Dual Monarchy.

  In stumped the man who was the former military governor of Shqiperi, the man who’d decided Shqiperi needed a king, the man who’d decided he knew exactly which king Shqiperi needed, and the man who’d thought he’d got the king he’d decided on. Made quite a procession for one fellow, didn’t he?

  He stopped at the prescribed distance from the throne. He bowed the prescribed bow. “Your Majesty,” he said: the prescribed phrase. Except he didn’t say, “Your Majesty.” He said, “Your Majesty?” He admitted the possibility of doubt that I was his Majesty.

  Doubt is not a good thing. Doubt subverts faith. If you don’t have faith in me on this score, ask a priest. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a sedate Eliphilatelist, a wild-eyed Zibeonite, or a votary of the Quadrate God. He will tell you the same thing. Doubt does subvert faith. If you could find a priest who serves the old Aenean gods nowadays, he would tell you the same thing, too. But you can’t find one of those priests any more. They’re as extinct as unicorns (or is it virgins?). Doubt has subverted their faith.

  “Your Excellency,” I said. I didn’t sound like a man who had doubts. Well, I daresay the brandy helped. “What brings you here today, your Excellency?”

  Like I didn’t know! Scribes!

  “Your Majesty?” There it was again, that cursed question mark, hanging in the air. And if Essad Pasha didn’t get his punctuation revised, Max and I might end up hanging in the air, too-by our necks, or perhaps in some fashion even less pleasant than that.

  “Yes?” I said, as portentously as a sozzled sovereign could. I didn’t doubt that I was King Halim Eddin-or if I did, no one else ever knew it.

  Essad Pasha gathered himself. I was glad to see he needed to gather himself. He wasn’t sure I was Halim Eddin. But he wasn’t sure I wasn’t Halim Eddin, either. Good. That gave me something to work with. After coughing a couple of times (which made me stare at him to see if he’d suddenly turned tall and lean: he hadn’t), he said, “Your Majesty, I have received a pecu
liar, a most peculiar, report from the offices of Consolidated Crystal.”

  “Have you?” I said indifferently-or maybe I was just drunk. “Well, what report is this?”

  He sounded hesitant. He sounded apologetic-better that than sounding apoplectic, I suppose. But I heard from him what I’d already heard from Max: that the Hassockian Atabeg, Eliphalet smite his scrawny arse with boils, had the infernal gall to deny that I was the authentic Prince Halim Eddin, just because I wasn’t.

  “Oh, that,” I said, more indifferently still. “Well, weren’t you expecting that?”

  “Your Majesty?” Now Essad Pasha sounded like he doubted which end was up, and, unlike some people in the throne room I could name, he wasn’t even pie-eyed-or I don’t think he was. “I don’t understand, your Majesty.”

  “Obviously.” I piled on the scorn the way Shqipetari cooks pile on the grease.

  It worked, too. I could all but hear the gears grinding inside Essad Pasha’s head. An impostor who knew he’d been found out should have trembled like an aspen leaf in fall. I didn’t act the way a terrified fraud should have. I acted every inch a king, or at least a prince.

  “Perhaps your Majesty would be gracious enough to explain?” Cautious wasn’t a bad way for Essad Pasha to sound, either.

  “Perhaps he would.” I don’t think I’d ever talked about myself in the third person before. It’s even more fun than the royal we. “Perhaps he wouldn’t have to if he were served by men who could see past the end of their nose.”

  Behind me, Max coughed. Well, it might have been the two-headed eagle on the wall, but I suspected the doubtable-to say nothing of redoubtable-Captain Yildirim. Essad Pasha looked wounded. He wouldn’t have bothered with an expression like that for a man he didn’t believe in. He would have gone about wounding the pretender instead. “North and south, east and west, my ignorance is wide as the sky, deep as the sea, black as blackest midnight,” he said. “Would your Majesty grant his slave the boon of enlightenment?”

  When a Hassocki goes all poetical on you, he’s either being insulting or you’ve got him on the run. Essad Pasha wasn’t being insulting. I smiled…to myself. Then I fed him the same farrago of nonsense about why the Atabeg couldn’t publicly admit I was who I was that I’d rammed down Max’s throat.

  Max did what any normal human being would do: he gagged. Essad Pasha swallowed the whole thing. He didn’t even choke. He must have been eating Shqipetari cooking for a long time.

  “I see, your Majesty,” he breathed when I was through. “Indeed, that makes most excellent good sense.”

  Yes, maybe it was the two-headed eagle that coughed. When I looked back at Max, he wasn’t doing it. I knew what he was thinking, though: that it made no sense at all. I was thinking the same thing. Then again, in the Nekemte Peninsula things that make no sense often prove perfectly sensible, while what would be sensible anywhere else turns out to be the height of folly.

  An actor in a down-at-the-heels circus would be most unlikely to claim the crown of Albion, for instance. He would be even less likely to find it plopped on his head.

  I graciously inclined my head to Essad Pasha. “Now that you see where the truth lies”-and the truth was lying as hard as it could, believe you me it was-“perhaps you will be so kind as to take it back to your junior officers, to avoid any unfortunate outbreaks of excessive zeal.”

  To keep them from coming over here and murdering me, I meant. I happen to think it sounded much nicer the way I put it.

  Essad Pasha bowed. “As your Majesty commands, so shall it be.” He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the throne room. I looked down at my hands. I felt like a successful surgeon. And so I was: I’d just amputated Essad Pasha’s question mark, and without even numbing him beforehand.

  “My hat’s off to you, your Majesty,” Max said. May Eliphalet beshrew me if he hadn’t doffed it when I looked around.

  “If a man knows the truth when he hears it, he will do what is right,” I said, which sounded good and had nothing to do with anything. Essad Pasha couldn’t tell the truth from saltwater taffy. As for doing what was right-he was doing what I wanted, which was even better.

  Having removed or at least reduced Essad Pasha’s inflamed interrogative, I thought the world was my oyster. And maybe it was, but I forgot something essential: oysters don’t keep. No sooner had Essad Pasha departed than Skander bowed to me and said, “Your Majesty, a woman wishes to appeal her sentence as a witch.”

  “Oh, she does, does she?” I wasn’t so sure that sounded appealing to me. “Can she do that?”

  Skander shrugged. “It is for you to decide. You are the king.”

  So I was. For the first time, I wondered if I wanted to be. Romping through the harem was fun. Declaring war on Belagora was fun, too. So was arranging things so the mountain dragons decided Belagoran soldiers made even better snacks than sheep (to say nothing of shepherds).

  But hearing a possible-probably a probable-witch’s appeal? It sounded much too much like work. Worse, it sounded like boring work. I didn’t want to admit that to Skander. I didn’t much want to admit it to myself, either. Not wanting to admit it, I asked the majordomo, “What is the Shqipetari custom? I am not of your blood”-Eliphalet be praised!-“and I do not wish to offend by accident or ignorance.”

  He only shrugged again. “We have not had a king for many, many years. The custom is what your Majesty chooses to make it. Once your Majesty makes it, we will uphold it with all our might.”

  “What will they do with the woman if I don’t hear her appeal?” I asked.

  “Burn her, I suppose. Or else stone her,” Skander said indifferently. “Give her what she deserves, anyhow.”

  “I see.” And I did. So much for Skander’s faith in her innocence. Maybe I could enlighten the Shqipetari. By all appearances, they needed it. “Fetch her in. I will hear her,” I declared in ringing tones.

  “Before you do, though, call Zogu the wizard to the palace,” Max put in. “Just on the off chance she is what everybody thinks she is.”

  I thought that sentiment shockingly illiberal. Skander evidently thought it sensible. He bowed first to me, then to my minister for special affairs. “Yes, your Majesty. Yes, your Excellency.” He hurried away.

  That Peshkepiia was a small town had its advantages. No more than a quarter of an hour later, Zogu stood before me. “At your service, your Majesty,” he said. “Which mangy trull has decided to try her luck with you?” He didn’t seem to have much faith in her innocence, either, did he?

  “I didn’t hear who she was,” I confessed. “Skander?”

  “She is called Shenkolle, your Majesty.” He pronounced the name with fastidious distaste, almost as if he were Rexhep.

  Zogu laughed and laughed. “And she says she’s not a witch? Next you’ll tell me the joyhouse girls aren’t whores!”

  “She is entitled to her appeal,” I said stiffly. Zogu thought that was funnier yet. I nodded to Skander. “Bring her in. I’ll listen to what she has to say.”

  “Yes, your Majesty.” He sighed, but he obeyed.

  When I got a look at Shenkolle, my first thought was, She sure looks like a witch. She was old. She was bent. She was homely. She had a long nose and a sharp chin with a wart on it. If she hadn’t been conjured straight from the pages of Hans Eliphalet Andersen and the Grim Brethren, she should have been.

  “Do you speak Hassocki?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes, your Majesty.” She didn’t sound like a witch. She sounded the way you wish the girl of your dreams sounded. She turned your blood to sparkling wine.

  Zogu was immune to that…purr. I don’t know how, but he was. If I hadn’t believed he was a strong wizard before, I would have now. “What do they say you were up to this time, you old she-devil?” he asked Shenkolle.

  “I didn’t do anything, your Majesty.” She ignored Zogu and concentrated on me. Listening to her, I would have been putty-well, perhaps something than stiffer than putty-in her hands.
She went on, “I am innocent. I am nothing but a poor woman wronged.”

  “You’re the richest poor woman in Peshkepiia, that’s dead certain,” Zogu said. “How many big, fat silver shekels from Vespucciland did you bury in your garden week before last?”

  “Why, you sneaky old crow!” Shenkolle screeched. When she wasn’t talking to me, or maybe when she was angry, she sounded the way she looked. Then her voice-magically?-softened again. She batted her red-tracked eyes at me. “It’s a lie, a foul, evil lie, your Majesty.”

  When she spoke directly to me, I believed. Well, no: it wasn’t quite that. When she spoke directly to me, I didn’t care whether she was telling the truth or not, any more than I cared that she looked like my granny’s wicked cousin. I glanced over at Max. By the way he was staring at Shenkolle, she’d ensnared him, too.

  But not Zogu. He laughed some more. By all the signs, he was having the time of his life. “Prove you’re not a liar, Shenkolle,” he said. “Swear by the Quadrate God that you’re telling the truth. Come on-you can do it. ‘North and south, east and west, I am telling the truth.’”

  She tried. I watched her try. The words wouldn’t come. Her eyes snapped with fury. Her face turned as red as a drunkard’s nose. But the words would not come. All she could get out was, “Have mercy, your Majesty!”

  She still sounded as seductive as ever. But if failing to take the oath didn’t break the spell, it did dent it. Max sighed, a sad little noise. That was just how I felt. I asked her, “Do you really have those shekels in your garden?”

  “Why, yes, your Majesty,” she said sweetly, though the glare she sent Zogu was anything but sweet. Then she remembered she had to aim at me. “Do you want them? If you do, of course they are yours. Anything you want of me is yours.”

  Even after looking at her, and even after two wild nights in the harem, the sheer promise in her voice tempted me to…I don’t know what. But, with her charm dented, I was able to say, “I don’t want them for myself. If you pay them to the people you wronged, will it buy you forgiveness?” Before she could answer, I turned to the majordomo and asked, “What do you think, Skander?”