Every Inch a King Page 3

  Yes, I knew it was going to happen if I drank much more. And I drank much more anyhow. It was my own fault. I knew that, too. Come the next morning, knowing didn’t help.

  I staggered out of my wagon wishing I were dead. My mouth tasted the way the gutters in Thasos smell. A demon drummer twenty feet tall pounded the top of my head every time my heart beat. If I opened my eyes too wide, I was sure I would bleed to death through them. It might have been a relief.

  Right at that moment, I probably didn’t look much like Prince Halim Eddin. As I say, followers of the Quadrate God don’t drink, or at least they’re not supposed to. There are exceptions-oh, indeed there are-but I couldn’t have told you if the prince was one of them.

  Thinking of him, though, helped steady me on my feet. I ate some raw cabbage: the Lokrian hangover cure. I ate some tripe soup: the Hassocki hangover cure. I had the hair of the dog that bit me: my personal hangover cure. Put them all together and I was at least within screaming distance of my old self-if a bit on the flatulent side-by the time Max emerged.

  He looked as bad as I’d felt a little earlier. He had his head in his hands, as if afraid he’d lose it. He didn’t just have the hair of the dog. He had the tail and the ears and one of the hind legs, and a little tripe soup to go with it.

  Everybody has to find his own cure for the morning after. Max of Witte’s worked for him, and faster than mine worked for me. One of the things that proved is, his liver is made of sterner stuff than mine. He gave me a sepulchral smile-almost the only kind he owns-and said, “And how are you this morning, your Majesty?” He was joking, the way everybody had been the night before.

  I took a deep breath. “Max,” I said, “how would you like to be the aide-de-camp to the new King of Shqiperi?”

  He looked at me as if he thought I’d gone smack out of my mind. “I think you’ve gone smack out of your mind,” he said.

  “Why?” I grabbed the copy of the Thasos Chronicle Ludovic had brought in. I opened it to the story about how the Shqipetari were looking for a new king. Sure as sure, that was-or might as well have been-my face looking out from the page. I tapped it with my forefinger. Then I tapped the end of my own nose. “They’re looking for Prince Halim Eddin, the Hassockian Atabeg’s nephew. And, by the Two Prophets, we’ll give them Halim Eddin!” I tapped my nose again.

  Actually, the Two Prophets had very little to do with becoming King of Shqiperi, except in the negative sense. Like the Hassocki, most Shqipetari follow the Quadrate God. That was why they were interested in Halim Eddin and not one of the nine million unemployed princelings from Schlepsig or Narbonensis or Torino. I didn’t think the other kingdoms in the Nekemte Peninsula would be particularly thrilled at that. Like the Lokrians, Vlachia and Belagora and Plovdiv and Dacia all reverence the Two Prophets, even if they are Zibeonite heretics.

  Max looked from me to the journal and back again. “All right, you look the part,” he admitted. “But how much Hassocki do you speak?”

  “Enough to assure thee that thou art the bastard child of a poxed camel-driver and an innocent sheep he deceived and debauched,” I answered in that tongue. One hitch in the Hassocki Army was enough to make me fluently obscene. By the time I finished the second term, I was just plain fluent. Languages have always come easy for me-easier than steady work.

  His eyebrows leaped. “That’s pretty good-thou shriveled and flyblown horse turd.” Max knew some Hassocki, too. I thought I’d remembered that. It would help.

  “Are you game?” I pushed him. “If you turn yellow on me now, you’ll never forgive yourself, and you know it. If we pull this off, people will still be talking about it a hundred years from now.”

  “And if we don’t, the Shqipetari will murder us. Or maybe the Hassockian soldiers still in their country will beat them to the punch.” Max was not an optimist. But then, as I’ve found since, nobody who’s ever had much to do with the Land of the Eagle is an optimist. Taken all in all, the Nekemte Peninsula is a backwater. Well, Shqiperi is a backwater even by the standards of the Nekemte Peninsula. It’s mountainous. It’s isolated. The Hassocki garrison there was long since cut off from any hope of relief or rescue. The national sport, as far as anyone can tell, is the blood feud.

  But I could be a king!

  I looked down my nose, so much like Prince Halim Eddin’s nose, at Max. Well, actually, I looked up it at him, since he’s about six feet eight. In my toploftiest tones, I said, “I don’t think you’ve got the nerve.”

  If he’d had only the hair of the dog, he probably would have laughed and told me I was right. With a good deal more than that aboard, though, his pinched, sallow cheeks turned red. “Who hasn’t?” he growled. “I’ll go anywhere you go, Otto, and you know it cursed well.”

  And I did. We’d been some strange places together, Max and I, and who was watching whose back wasn’t always obvious. “All right,” I said, roaring as gently as any sucking dove. “All right. The first place we need to go is a public crystal.”

  “Why?” Max asked. “So we can tell the world we’re sticking our head in the dragon’s mouth?” He opened his mouth very wide and bit down. The effect would have been more dramatic if he didn’t have a missing front tooth. It somehow impaired his ferocity.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “What are the Shqipetari and Essad Pasha going to need before they think Halim Eddin is on his way?” Essad Pasha was the Hassocki general in command of the garrison there. Before the war, he’d been the Hassocki governor of Shqiperi. He had fingers in so many pies, he probably had about four hands.

  Max looked at me. “I was going to say a hunting license, but I don’t suppose they bother with them there.”

  “Funny man! You should do vaudeville and music-hall turns instead of this,” I said. “What they’ll need is a crystal message from Vyzance saying he’s on his way.”

  “And how do you propose to get them to send one, thou great lion of the perfumиd bedchamber, thou running rabbit on the blood-filled field?” Max dropped into Hassocki again. It’s a good language for being…charming in.

  I just grinned. I hadn’t served those two hitches in the Hassocki army for nothing-though with what the Hassocki pay, it often seemed that way at the time. “It so happens that I’m friends with a certain Murad Bey. He was a lieutenant when I was a sergeant. These days, he’s a major in the Hassockian Ministry of War.”

  “And he’d send a message like that?” Max shook his head. He does dubious very well. “Wouldn’t he sooner send one ordering us arrested and handed over to the torturers?”

  “I know this man, I tell you. It’s possible he’ll say no, if he thinks the Empire’s honor is touched,” I said. “But if he says he’ll send the message I need, he’ll send it. He likes practical jokes. Did I ever tell you about the time when he had three different officers thinking they’d got the colonel’s courtesan pregnant?”

  “The joke’ll be on us if the torturers are waiting,” Max pointed out.

  “But it’ll be a bigger joke if it’s on Essad Pasha and the Shqipetari,” I said. “Torturing foreigners is easy. It happens all the time. Making one of your own generals look like a fool, though…”

  Max didn’t answer right away. Instead, he went to work on the dog’s other hind leg. After he set down the jug, he got to his feet. “This had better work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, I’ll never forgive you.”

  If it didn’t, he’d probably be too dead to forgive me. Of course, I’d probably be too dead to need forgiving. I stood up, too. “Let’s get moving,” I said.

  Lokrian soldiers swaggered through the streets of Thasos. They were little dark men in green uniforms. They had kepis and neatly trimmed mustaches. There were also soldiers from Plovdiv, off to the northwest, in the streets. They were bigger and fairer, and wore tobacco-brown uniforms. They had floppy hats and big, bushy mustaches.

  They didn’t look as if they much cared for Lokrians. The Lokrians didn’t look as if they much cared for them, either. Lokris and Plovdiv
had been allies against the Hassocki. Of course, everybody in the Nekemte Peninsula-except the Shqipetari, mind you-had been allies against the Hassocki. Now, here in Thasos, you could watch the thieves fall out.

  That round of fighting didn’t start till later, though, so I’m not going to talk about it now. If you talk about all the wars, you’ll never get around to anything else.

  Both the soldiers from Lokris and the soldiers from Plovdiv looked as if they didn’t much care for Max and me. I did my best not to notice, or not to be noticed noticing. Blithe ignorance tends to fray, though, when somebody aims a crossbow at your brisket. After a moment, when Max and I just kept walking, the Lokrian lowered the cursed thing and grinned as if he’d been joking. Maybe he had. But not even Dooger and Cark would hire a clown with a sense of humor like that.

  “Nice fellow,” I remarked in Schlepsigian. If the Lokrian soldier spoke my language-not likely but not impossible-he couldn’t have proved by my tone that I was being sarcastic.

  “Sure is,” Max said, just as heartily. Neither one of us is usually such a good liar so early in the morning.

  The Dual Monarchy has a post office in Thasos. Narbonensis has one. So does Albion. So does Schlepsig. And so did the Hassocki. It was their city, after all. Now that’s a Lokrian post office. The Green Dragon flies above it, not the red lightning bolt on gold.

  Right next to what’s now the Lokrian post office is the local Consolidated Crystal headquarters. Consolidated Crystal doesn’t belong to any one kingdom. They say their services belong to people from all the kingdoms-people with the money to pay for them, of course. Actually, in a lot of ways they’re above all the kingdoms. Because what they do is so important, any kingdom that tried to interfere with them would end up in trouble with all its neighbors. Nobody talks about that, but everybody knows it.

  We went in. Max held the door open for me. “Your Majesty,” he murmured-and then let go of the door so it swung shut and got me in the seat of the pants.

  “Some aide-de-camp you turned out to be,” I said. “I should have asked Ilona.”

  “There’s a difference between aide-de-camp and camp follower,” Max said loftily. He was lucky Ilona wasn’t there to hear that. She would have followed him, all right-with a knife.

  Inside the CC headquarters, you never would have known that Thasos had changed hands not long before, or that fighting still sputtered not far away. Everything was peaceful and orderly. People-Lokrians, Hassocki, an Albionese merchant in baggy tweeds, us-waited in line for the next available crystallographer. Lots of places in Thasos, lines just sit there. They don’t move. Not at CC headquarters. Perish the thought. Those people know what efficiency means.

  We got to the front of the line pretty quick. “Good morning, gentlemen,” the clerk said in fluent Schlepsigian. I’d already heard him use Lokrian and Hassocki. A man of parts, plainly, and smart parts at that. I look like Halim Eddin-and I had the picture to prove it!-while Max could be anything under the sun except handsome. But this clever young fellow pegged us.

  The crystallographer he sent us to also spoke Schlepsigian, though with a Hassocki accent. “To whom do you wish to send your message, gentlemen?” he asked.

  “To Major Murad Bey, at the Ministry of War in Vyzance,” I answered.

  He blinked. “I hope the Lokrians’ sorcerers will pass it,” he said. “Lokris and the Hassockian Empire are still at war, you know.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed,” I said. He was a swarthy man, but his cheeks went pink anyhow. I went on, “I suppose they’ll use the intent test. They’re welcome to, for I mean no harm to Lokris.”

  “Ah. Good. Excellent, in fact.” He blinked again. “You know something of this business.”

  “A little something, maybe-no more.” I knew a good deal more, but that wasn’t the crystallographer’s affair. It’s a long story. In fact, I wasn’t even there when they thought I was. If I was there, I didn’t do it. If I did do it, I didn’t mean it. And if I did mean it, the bastard had it coming. But I digress. Back to it: “Here is the message.” I gave it to him, finishing, “Please acknowledge at CC office Thasos.”

  “I’ll send it. They will vet it,” the crystallographer warned. I shrugged. He bent low over the crystal on his desk. In places like Albion and Narbonensis, crystallographers wear turbans to look mystical. In Thasos, ordinary people wear turbans. The crystallographer probably wore one himself when he went off duty. Here, he had on a homburg to look modern.

  He murmured the necessary charms, and the eight-digit number that made sure he reached a particular crystal in Vyzance and not one in, say, Lutetia. Nobody in the capital of Narbonensis needed to know anything about this. No, not yet.

  Light flared in the heart of the transparent crystal sphere. As it faded, I saw the tiny image of another crystallographer. He too had a homburg on his head. Vyzance, sure enough.

  Our crystallographer recited the message. The other crystallographer read it back. His voice sounded as if it came from very far away. As a matter of fact, it did come from very far away, even if the crystal sat right there in front of it. When the men on both sides of the connection agreed they had the message straight, they broke the arcane link. The crystal on the crystallographer’s desk went back to being a bocci ball for ghosts.

  “You told the truth-I had no interference from the Lokrians,” our crystallographer said. “If there is a reply to this…communication, it will be delivered to you at the carnival.”

  “Circus!” I said indignantly. Eliphalet help me-Zibeon, too-there is another step down from Dooger and Cark’s. I’ve played in carnivals. I hope I never have to do it again. It’s not honest work, and that’s the best I can say for it.

  The crystallographer would have had to cheer up to seem unimpressed. “Go in peace,” he murmured. “North and south, east and west, go in peace.” Yes, he followed the Quadrate God.

  “North and south, east and west, peace to you as well,” I said in Hassocki. His big, dark eyes widened. He didn’t hear that every day from an obvious follower of the Two Prophets.

  Max and I had to stand in another line to settle the tab for the message. Anywhere in Thasos but here, we could have dickered to our hearts’ content. We could have drawn up chairs, ordered some thick, sweet Hassocki-style coffee, taken a few puffs from the mouthpiece of a water pipe, and told the clerk what a thief he was. Lokrians are as mad for haggling as Hassocki. But not at Consolidated Crystal. One price per word, all over the civilized world and in as many of the barbarous parts as they reach. They don’t even charge extra in Tver, and if that doesn’t prove my point, nothing ever would.

  “Now what?” Max asked as we left the CC offices. “We wait to find out whether this Murad Bey is as daft as you are?”

  I wouldn’t have put it precisely like that. Since Max had, though, I swept off my hat and gave him my grandest bow. “What else?” I said.

  “We could make our funeral arrangements now,” he suggested. “We’ll probably be too busy dying to do it later.” Before I could find something suitably devastating to say to that, he shook his head. “No-wouldn’t help. No undertaker here is going to have a branch office in Shqiperi.”

  “Think on the bright side, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “You’re going to be aide-de-camp to a king. You’ll help make decisions of state. And you’ll brag about it afterwards as long as you live.”

  “Twenty minutes’ worth of bragging. Oh, joy.” Max is a good fellow in a great many ways, but he’s convinced every silver lining has a cloud.

  We stopped on the way back to the circus and bought sausages skewered on sticks and then dipped in maize batter and fried: a local delicacy indigestible enough to satisfy the most ambitious dyspeptic. The sausage-seller was a Lokrian-probably not named Kleon, worse luck. He tried to charge us some outrageous price because we were foreigners. I couldn’t tell him what I thought of him in his own language, but figured he was likely to understand Hassocki: “Thou dog and son of a dog, thou wouldst ste
al the silver set on the eyes of thy mother’s corpse.”

  “May the fleas of a thousand camels afflict thy scrotum,” he returned amiably. We haggled in Hassocki, though some of the gestures we used had nothing to do with numbers. I finally argued him down to something approaching reason.

  Max bit into his sausage. The batter crunched. Grease ran down his chin. He nodded approval. “Not bad. They’d go good with a seidel or two of beer.”

  Now, what passes for beer in Thasos is a far cry from what we brew in Schlepsig. Much of it, indeed, tastes as if it has passed-through the kidneys of a diabetic donkey. Still, as they say, any beer is better than none, and the food had plenty of flavor to make up for what the drink lacked. We found a beer cellar. We found its product…adequate.

  Having swallowed the last bite of sausage, Max swallowed the stick, too-after his sword, it hardly made an hors d’oeuvre. The tapman’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. I hoped-and so, no doubt, did Max-he’d be astonished enough to give us our next seidel free. He wasn’t. He didn’t. Bit by bit, naпvetй leaks out of the world.

  I was looking forward to Shqiperi. I was sure naпvetй lingered there. It must have, or the Shqipetari wouldn’t have believed a king would solve their problems. Or maybe Essad Pasha, being a Hassocki general, thought a king of his own blood would solve his problems.

  When we got back to the circus tent, we started practicing for the evening show. Max had no trouble. I discovered doing trapeze flips with one of those sausages in my stomach was every bit as enjoyable as if I’d swallowed a thirty-pound catapult stone instead. If I had a weak stomach, I never would have turned acrobat in the first place, but I don’t think I ever put it to a sterner test.

  I was upside down in midair when I spotted the messenger boy in the blue CC uniform. “Are you looking for Otto of Schlepsig?” I called in Hassocki as soon as I was right side up again.

  “That’s right, sir. Are you he?” The kid spoke with a Lokrian accent, but we could understand each other.

  “I am no one else but the king of acrobats, Otto himself.” Hard to strike a pose while hanging from a trapeze, but I managed. If a man will not blow a blast from his own horn, it shall remain unblown forever.