Every Inch a King Page 6

  He seemed surprised to see us. “Is something amiss, my masters? Your cabin does not suit you? It is the best we had left.”

  I daresay it was, too: a judgment on the Keraunos, I fear. But that, for the moment, was beside the point. “Our cabin will serve,” I said. “Is it not yet the fourth hour of the afternoon, however?”

  He set a languid glance toward the hourglass set in front of the wheel. As languidly, he dipped his head in agreement. “Why, yes. I do believe it is.”

  “And is not this ship scheduled to sail at the fourth hour of the afternoon?” I asked with such patience as I could muster. A Schlepsigian ship would have sailed when scheduled, come what may. To my people, schedules are as sacred as if Eliphalet and Zibeon wrote each and every one. The wagons roll on time in Schlepsig, let me assure you.

  Other folk, I fear, have other notions. “Oh. The schedule,” the skipper said, as if he’d forgotten such a thing existed. He probably had, too. He shrugged one of those elaborate shrugs that are only too common all over the Nekemte Peninsula. What those shrugs say is, You’re cursed well stuck, sucker, and you can’t do a thing about it, so scream as much as you please-it won’t do you any bloody good. He waited, no doubt hoping I would start screaming. But I’ve seen those shrugs before. Indeed I have. I waited, too. He sighed, balked of his sport. “Well, my master, we will sail-pretty soon.”

  Pretty soon, in those parts, can mean anything from a couple of hours to a couple of months. “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.

  “Oh, this and that.” He gave me another shrug, even more melodramatic than the first. “You are so anxious to be gone from Thasos?”

  I knew what that meant, too. He wanted to know if soldiers or gendarmes or an outraged husband with a blood feud were on our trail. If he could soak us for more silver to make a quick getaway, he would. But he couldn’t, not this time. “No, by no means,” I said truthfully. I have paid for a quick getaway or two in my time, but not that day. Max and I were honest-or no one could prove we weren’t. I went on, “I just wanted to make sure you understood.”

  His bushy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. “Understood what?”

  “You’re going to be late.”

  He didn’t laugh in my face, but the look on his said he was about to. Around a yawn whose studied insolence he must have spent a long time practicing, he asked, “And so?”

  “Well, if you’re late, I’m afraid you’ll make my friend here very unhappy.” I nodded toward Max. He was standing extraordinarily straight, no doubt in relief from being doubled over belowdecks like a pair of trousers in a small carpetbag. It made him seem even taller than usual-an obelisk with ears, you might say.

  The captain of the Keraunos looked him up and down and then up again. “And so?” he repeated-he had style, in a reptilian way.

  Max drew his sword. The captain stiffened. So did I. Murdering the man before we set sail might get us talked about. But Max didn’t slice chunks off him, however richly he deserved it. Instead, he examined the blade and then took two steps over to the rail. He began carving strips from the wood. The strips were very long and very thin-so thin, you could almost see through them. They came off effortlessly, one after another.

  The captain eyed them as they fluttered down to the deck one by one. So did several sailors. You could almost hear the wheels going round in their heads. Here was an uncommonly large man with an uncommonly sharp sword. If they were lucky, they might bring him down without getting hurt themselves. If they weren’t so lucky-which seemed a better bet-one or more of them would end up skewered. Shashlik, they say in that part of the world.

  One of the sailors said something in Lokrian. I know what I would have said in his sandals. Assuming he had said it, I nodded pleasantly to the captain and spoke in Hassocki: “Yes, I think we ought to sail about now, too.”

  He started to tell me something with a bit of flavor to it, but then his eyes went back to Max, who was still slicing strips from the rail. He seemed ready to cut right through it-or anything else that got in his way. The skipper coughed a couple of times, swallowing whatever he’d been about to say. What came out instead was, “Well, perhaps we should.”

  I bowed. Always be polite after you’ve won. “Many thanks, kind sir. I knew when I first set eyes on you that you were a reasonable man.” Like anybody else, I defined a reasonable man as a man who does what I want.

  When I first set eyes on the Keraunos’ weatherworker, what crossed my mind was, Be careful what you ask for-you may get it. Had he been a circus performer instead of a wizard, he would have worked for an outfit like Dooger and Cark’s. Since he was what he was, he sailed on the Keraunos. The captain of any better ship would have booted him off the stern. Man and tub, they deserved each other.

  He might have been a good man once, or he might have been one of those dissolute wrecks whom trouble shadows even before they have fuzz on their upper lip. He’d been pickling in his own juices-and the ones he poured down-for a lot of years since then. The whites of his eyes were almost as yellow as the yolks of poached eggs. He swayed in the slight natural breeze as if it would blow him away. His hands shook so badly, he couldn’t light a cigar. One of the sailors finally did it for him. He puffed on the cheroot-a nasty weed flavored with anise (a Lokrian vice)-and then coughed like a dying consumptive.

  At a gesture from the captain, another sailor fetched him a flask. He tilted his head back. The flask gurgled. So did his stomach, when the nasty stuff in the flask hit it. “Ahh!” he said-a pungent exclamation, because the rotgut was flavored with anise, too. His eyes crossed for a moment. But when they focused again, you had a better picture of the wizard he used to be. Then he took another pull at the flask, and you knew why he wasn’t that wizard any more.

  The captain shouted to his crew as if there was no time to lose. And there probably wasn’t. They raced up the masts like monkeys. Could the weatherworker get us out of Thasos harbor while the popskull still fueled him and before it knocked him for a loop? We’d find out.

  Down came the sails from the yards. The weatherworker gathered himself. He began the chant that would call the wind into the sails. To my surprise, the words were in Schlepsigian. That probably showed where he’d studied magic. Where he’d studied looking up at the bottom of an empty bottle, I can’t tell you. He’d got full marks in it, wherever it was.

  For the moment, though, he stood precariously balanced between a hangover so devastating as to make any I’ve had seem a mild annoyance by comparison and drunkenness complete and absolute enough to make him forget his own name, or even that he had one.

  “Poor bastard,” Max murmured, recognizing the signs. I nodded. No, it wasn’t hard to see how this weatherworker had wound up on the Thunderbolt.

  For the moment, the balance held. I could feel the power flowing into him and then flowing out through him. When he pointed to the sails with a commanding gesture, his hands hardly trembled at all.

  And that gesture, by what would serve for a miracle till a real one came along, did what it was supposed to do. A weatherworker operating alone can’t change much weather. One man-or woman-isn’t strong enough. It takes great teams of them for that, teams usually put together only in time of war. But one weatherworker can raise enough wind to fill a ship’s sails, and from a direction that will take the ship where the skipper wants to go.

  At first flapping and then taut as the silk over a well-built woman’s bosom, the Keraunos’ sails filled with wind. The masts and yards creaked, taking up the strain. The weatherworker didn’t creak, but he was pretty plainly feeling the strain, too. He swigged from the flask yet again. That might help him for a little while now, but he-and maybe we as well-would pay for it later.

  Still, later was later. For now, we began to move, in the beginning so slowly that I wasn’t even sure the motion was real, but then faster and faster. The quay disappeared behind us. The captain stood at the wheel, guiding the ship away from Thasos. The weatherworker kept on chan
ting. Our wind kept on blowing. The Keraunos’ sails kept on billowing. Thasos-indeed, dry land itself-faded and shrank in the distance.

  “We’re on our way,” I said to Max. “We’re well and truly started.”

  “Talk to me when we’re on our way out of Shqiperi with our heads still attached to our shoulders,” he said. “Then I’ll be impressed.”

  If poetry were wine, there wouldn’t be enough in Max’s soul to sozzle a squirrel, and what there is has mostly soured to vinegar. He has his virtues, Max does, but his flights of fancy stubbornly refuse to grow feathers.

  Thasos sits between two long, fingerlike, south-facing peninsulas that shield its harbor from most storms. By the time the weatherworker began to sway as if he were in a high breeze, we’d cleared them both. We were out in the open sea-or as open as the Mykonian Sea gets. It’s full of rocky, jagged islands, as if one of the ancient Lokrian gods had pissed out the ocean and passed a swarm of god-sized kidney stones while he was doing it.

  Little fishing boats bobbed on the wine-dark water or scudded this way and that with their lateen sails. They went by the real breeze, the true breeze, and if it died they would lie becalmed. Fishing boats can’t afford weatherworkers. By all I can tell, most fishing boats can’t afford a bloody thing. Fishing has to be a harder way to make a living than performing in a circus, and I know of nothing worse I can say about it.

  For a while, the Thunderbolt cracked along, all sails set, all sails full, the weatherworker raising enough wind to keep even Max from being too gloomy. It seemed too good to be true-and it was. The weatherworker had been gulping that anise-flavored swill every few minutes to fuel his wizardry. I don’t care how long you’ve been calcifying your liver; you can only do that for so long. And after a couple of hours of it, it was so long for him. He nodded in vague surprise, broke wind instead of raising it, and bonelessly crumpled to the deck.

  The breeze died. I wished the weatherworker would die, too, but that was bound to be too much to hope for. The sails went as limp as a granddad’s try for a third round. The Keraunos stopped creaking and started crawling. Her skipper stirred the weatherworker with his foot. The man never moved. “Oh, thou hellbound, swinish sot,” the captain sighed in Hassocki: as resigned a curse as I’ve ever heard. Then he started shouting in Lokrian. His crew hopped to it; I will say that. They must have been through this many times before. They shortened sail and swung the yards to take what advantage they could of the world’s wind. But we were going to be late, late, late to Lakedaimon.

  IV

  Once upon a time, the Lokrians were the most civilized people in the world. All the history books insist on it. And if that isn’t proof we’ve made progress over the past couple of thousand years, Eliphalet curse me if I know what would be.

  Scholars go on and on about the purity of ancient Lokrian sculpture, the magnificence of ancient Lokrian poetry, the innovation and insights of ancient Lokrian drama. For some reason or other, no one talks a whole lot about the ancient Lokrians themselves. And I’ll bet I know why: they must have been just as annoying and insufferable as modern Lokrians are.

  That was what I was thinking when the Keraunos finally got into Lakedaimon most of a day later than the miserable ship should have. We sailed into the harbor in fine style. The weatherworker was working again. He’d come out of his stupor, and he’d had enough anise-flavored firewater afterwards to remind him life might still be worth living. In between his spells of consciousness, we’d had to make do with fitful true breezes, but did he care about that? Care? He didn’t even know!

  Even now, Lakedaimon is a pretty town. The ruins on what they call Fortress Hill remind you of what a splendid place it was in the glory days of Lokris. Back then, of course, Lakedaimon tried to lord it over all its neighbors, and the other Lokrian city-states responded by trying to stick a stiletto in its back. Typical Lokrian politics, I fear. Two Lokrians will have three opinions and four faction fights. Lokrians will ally with an enemy’s enemy even if they know that fellow will turn on them as soon as he’s settled the first enemy’s hash. They think, Well, I lasted two days longer than he did and I got to gloat while he suffered, so who cares what happens next?

  Charming people.

  And they’ve always been like that. Take a look at ancient history if you don’t believe me. No, not the pretty stories-the history behind them. Yes, they held off the Sassanids all those years ago. Yes, they were heroes. Some of them were, anyhow. But an awful lot of city-states went over to the Great King. They fought on his side, and some of them were heroes, too. If he’d won, nobody would remember Lakedaimon.

  When Lakedaimon fought Pallas for all those years, didn’t she have a couple of civil wars, too? Wouldn’t she have had a better chance of winning if she hadn’t hated herself worse than she hated her enemies? Seems that way to me.

  One more. When the Aeneans conquered Lokris, how did they do it? Weren’t the Lokrians squabbling among themselves and with the Kingdom of Fyrom to the north? (The Lokrians claim the Fyromians were really Lokrian, too-just country cousins, you might say. These days, Fyrom is split among Lokris, Vlachia, and Plovdiv. Factions again, which argues that the Lokrians might be right.) Didn’t some Lokrians invite the Aeneans in to help their side? And didn’t the Aeneans pay them back by gobbling up all of Lokris one city-state at a time? If you look at it the right way, didn’t the Lokrians have it coming?

  I asked our peerless skipper where the Quay of the Red-Figure Winecup was. He shrugged, which made the gilded fringe on his epaulets bounce up and down. I asked a couple of sailors who spoke Hassocki. One pointed east, the other west. It didn’t matter. The Halcyon was bound to have sailed. Since it was crewed by Lokrians, too, normally I would have assumed it was also running late. But that would have been convenient for us, so I didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Then I asked the captain how to find the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. He gave me excellent, precise, detailed instructions. Somehow, I was less than astonished. If anyone was likely to know all there was to know about poxed trollops, our captain was the man.

  “The Gamemeno isn’t supposed to go out for a while,” Max said. “You should ask him to recommend a hostel.”

  I didn’t care for that. “No, thanks,” I said. “I want to go to a place where I won’t need a mage to kill bedbugs and fleas-and maybe crabs, too-afterwards.” I remembered the trollop one more time, and what might go with her.

  We took our duffels off the Keraunos and got away from the misnamed ship as fast and as far as we could. Two large men-and Max is almost two large men all by himself-are safe enough by daylight almost anywhere. We waved down a cab. The hackman spoke some Narbonese. “Best hostel?” he said when I inquired. “The Narbo, without a doubt. But you pay there, sir-you pay.”

  “What’s pretty good and costs a third as much?” was my next question.

  We ended up at a place called Papa Ioannakis’. It was three blocks away from the Narbo. The big, fancy hostel blocked its view of Fortress Hill. But it was clean, it was comfortable, and you didn’t feel a vampire sinking its fangs into your purse and sucking out your silver.

  The real Papa Ioannakis was a priest who fought the Hassocki and ended up dead before his time for his troubles. I neglected to point this out to Max. If he stayed ignorant of the fine points of Lokrian history-well, he did, that’s all. I preferred ignorance to babbling about evil omens, which is what I would have got if he knew that.

  “Not bad,” I said, sprawling out on my bed.

  “It would be better if we had some money coming in,” Max said.

  “We’ve got enough.” Odds are I sounded irritable. I felt irritable. “If you want to go stand on a street corner and swallow your sword in front of an upside-down hat, go right ahead. I don’t feel like turning backflips just so I can buy myself an extra mug of wine-thanks all the same. If this goes off the way I hope it will, I’ll never have to turn another backflip as long as I live.”

  “If this doesn’t go off
the way you hope it will, you’ll never turn another backflip, either,” Max pointed out. “But you won’t live long.”

  I didn’t argue with him. Life was too short. As a matter of fact, I wished that phrase hadn’t occurred to me so soon after his raven’s croak of doom. I wasn’t about to admit that, though, either to him or to myself. And I was glad all the way down to my toes that I hadn’t told him the story of Papa Ioannakis.

  The hostel named for the late, lamented Lokrian priest had a pretty fair eatery across the lobby from the front desk. The waiter, a fussy little man in an ill-fitting formal jacket and a cravat that looked as if a strangler had knotted it, spoke enough Narbonese to get by. He beamed when we ordered local specialties: Max chose capon cooked with lemon, while I had grape leaves stuffed with ground lamb and rice. Mine were quite tasty, and Max turned his capon into bones fast enough to persuade me that he enjoyed his. The menu offered foreign dishes, too, but the native fare was half as expensive and probably twice as good. The cook knew what he was doing with it; he wasn’t trying to imitate some other kingdom’s style.

  After a much better night than the two we’d spent aboard the Keraunos, we climbed Fortress Hill to look at the famous ruins there. Yes, it’s something everybody does. Yes, practically everybody we saw up there was from Schlepsig or the Dual Monarchy or Narbonensis or Albion. (The Lokrians take their ruins for granted. They’d have a lot more of them if they hadn’t torn some down to reuse the building stone.) But when were we going to be in Lakedaimon again? If the Two Prophets were kind, never.

  And, even if everybody goes to see the ruins, there’s a good reason: They’re worth seeing. Take Cytherea’s temple, for instance. You can’t see the thirty-five-foot gold-and-ivory statue of the love goddess the Lakedaimonians put in it; one gang of barbarians or another stole it a long time ago. But the temple itself still is-and deserves to be-famous for its lines. You’ve all looked at woodcuts or those clever little spells that make a pair of pictures join together in your sight so you see not two pictures but one with real depth. Well, the difference between those and the real thing is about the same as the difference between a journal story about a pork-and-cabbage casserole and a big helping of the casserole itself.