Every Inch a King Page 7

  Would you give a dog a woodcut of a bone?

  The famous Lokrian sun and sky don’t translate well in descriptions, either. All I can tell you is they don’t make weather like that in Schlepsig, and I wish they did. It was warm without being sticky. The sky was a deeper, purer blue than my home kingdom ever knows. Up at the top of Fortress Hill, you thought you could see all the way to the edge of the world. Yes, I know the world hasn’t got an edge. You thought you could see it anyway.

  Even Max was moved. He took off his hat, fanned himself with it, and said, “Nice view.” He really did.

  And yet like I told you, you hardly see any Lokrians up there. Oh, they have a few guards, to keep you from sticking a temple in your hip pocket and taking it back to your hotel, but that’s about all. Wait-I take it back. There was also a Lokrian woman up there. Her lines were almost as fine as the temples’, and she dressed to emphasize them. Her eyes were dark as two sloes, but it was obvious she was fast.

  “Is it that you speak Narbonese?” one of my fellow foreigners asked her, tipping his hat. After seeing so much marble, he was after something livelier.

  He got it, too. She gave him a slow, sidelong smile. “Sir, my mouth will do anything you like,” she purred in the same language. After that, he couldn’t take her down off Fortress Hill fast enough. I only wished I’d spoken to her first. By the way Max’s eyes followed her, he was wishing the same thing. No, he wasn’t wishing that I’d spoken to her first… Oh, you know what I mean.

  Now we both looked around for something of more recent vintage and softer curves than the famous stonework. We were out of luck, though. That miserable Narbonese seemed to have snagged the only woman of, ah, enterprise who’d gone up there that morning. No wonder we’re hereditary foes with Narbonensis, by Eliphalet’s whiskers.

  Since Max and I had no pleasant excuse to go back to Papa Ioannakis’, we tramped every inch of Fortress Hill. I got a little piece of classical marble in my shoe, and had to park my fundament on a bigger one so I could take off the shoe and shake out the pebble. It fell to the ground with a tiny click-a bit of ancient history returning to anonymity.

  Max, meanwhile, was peering down into the city. “Something’s going on down there,” he said.

  “Well, so what?” I said. “Lakedaimon’s a fair-sized town. Why shouldn’t something be going on?”

  “No, not something like that,” he said. “Something nasty.”

  Now, Max’s imagination can turn a wedding parade into a funeral procession. I’ve seen him do it. Actually, it’s impressive, if you like that kind of thing. So before I believed him, I stood up and had a look for myself. Damned if he wasn’t right. When people start chasing one another through the streets with clubs and spears and crossbows, something’s come unglued somewhere.

  Yes, we’d landed in Lakedaimon just in time for the Scriptural Riots. Thank you so much, Thunderbolt.

  Everybody in the civilized world knows the Scriptures were first written in ancient Lokrian. Some sarcastic sage said a few years ago that the Goddess learned Lokrian just so She could write the Scriptures-and learned it very badly, too. But, while everybody knows this, nobody-nobody normal, I mean, leaving priests and sages out of the bargain-thinks about it more than once every five years, if that often. If you want to read the Scriptures, you read them in your own language. If you’re feeling especially holy and you’ve got more schooling than is good for you, you’ll look at them in Aenean.

  But if you happen to be a Lokrian…If you happen to be a Lokrian, you read the Scriptures in ancient Lokrian. There’s only one problem with that. Modern Lokrian is closer to ancient Lokrian than Torinan, say, is to Aenean. But it’s not a whole lot closer. If you know modern Lokrian, you can sorta, kinda read the ancient language, with the accent on sorta, kinda.

  So somebody got the bright idea of finally-Lokris kicked out the Hassocki a long lifetime ago-translating the Scriptures into modern Lokrian. And he published his book. On the day we were there, he published his miserable book. If we’d sailed away in the Halcyon, we never would have had to worry about it. If the Keraunos’ weatherworker’d been sober, we never would have had to worry about it. The weatherworker was drunk. We didn’t get to sail. We had to worry about it.

  I have no idea whether this fellow’s translation was good, bad, or indifferent, mind you. I read even less Lokrian than I speak, and I don’t speak any. What I do know is that half the people in Lakedaimon seemed to think he was a hero, and the other half wanted to dip him in boiling butter-or, being Lokrians, possibly in olive oil instead.

  I know all this now, you understand. I’ve pieced it together from journal articles and such. What I knew then was that way too many people in long skirts and short ones were running around assaulting one another with intent to maim, or maybe to dip in boiling butter. Somehow, I didn’t think they would refrain from mayhem on my person just because my clothes said I was no Lokrian. If anything, both factions might decide that kicking in a foreigner’s ribs was the one pleasure they had in common.

  “How are we going to get back to the hostel?” Max asked. “They already seem pretty hostile down there.”

  In lieu of braining him with a chunk of classical marble, I nodded. “Don’t they just?” I said. “I suggest we go…cautiously.”

  “Good luck,” Max said. And we would need it. We were obvious foreigners. I’m a good-sized man, and I seem bigger next to Lokrians, who run short. Max is enormous next to anything this side of a temple steeple. The only way we could have made ourselves more conspicuous was by going naked. The idea did not appeal. We might have got by with it in ancient Lakedaimon, but not now, not now.

  The idea of staying up on Fortress Hill didn’t appeal, either. Fortress Hill has some of the most glorious stonework in the world. And that’s all it has. No beds. No cafes. No nothing, unless you felt like chewing rocks. I didn’t. “Let’s try it,” I said. Max made a horrible face, but he didn’t say no.

  We had no trouble going down the steps to the bottom of the hill. I knew why, too-the Lokrians didn’t feel like climbing them. There have to be more than there are at the Temple of Siwa, even if those are a lot steeper. But when we got to the bottom…The first thing we saw was a woman’s body. Someone had smashed in her head. Flies buzzed around the pool of blood. Max and I have both been through wars-but there wasn’t supposed to be a war here.

  Fine. That poor woman got killed in peacetime. It didn’t make her any less dead.

  My nostrils twitched. Then I coughed. You always smell a lot of smoke in a city, from cookfires and hearthfires and what have you. But you don’t get a gust of wind with smoke as thick as if you were smoking six pipes at once. “They’re trying to burn the place down,” Max observed. “That’s clever of them, isn’t it?”

  “Brilliant,” I said. If the Hassocki had set fire to Lakedaimon, it would have been a fearsome atrocity. Everybody would have screamed and made them stop. Since the Lokrians were doing it to themselves, everybody would yawn-except for the people who got roasted. They’d scream, all right.

  A band of a dozen or so rioters came tearing around a corner and started to rush right at us. They slowed down in a hurry, I must say. The sight of somebody Max’s size will do that to the most riotous rioter.

  Max bowed to them. Since he’s so long and lean, he folds up amazingly. As he straightened to show them that, yes, he really was as tall as they thought he was, I bowed in turn. And I kept right on going, turning the bow into a handstand. If I’d been wearing a short skirt like most of the Lokrians, that might have played hob with my modesty. Or it might not-do they have drawers under those things? Trust me: I never tried to find out.

  As things were, I had on ordinary civilized clothes: tunic, cravat, jacket, trousers. My hat fell off, but that was about it. I walked around on my hands, and waved to the Lokrians with one foot. If they were confused enough, I figured, they might go on leaving us alone.

  After I’d stopped waving-and it isn’t easy to do
if you’ve got shoes-Max grabbed my feet. We impersonated a drunken wheelbarrow and its even more pixilated operator. I’ve never played a drunken wheelbarrow before. Putting your shoulder to the wheel is hard when your shoulder is the wheel, or at least the brace that holds the wheel on. But what’s the point of performing if you can’t improvise?

  As well as a drunken wheelbarrow could, I kept an eye on the Lokrians. I knew I might have to play an all too sober sprinter any moment now. Some of the rioters were really fricaseed. But the sozzled ones stared with the others. Whatever they’d expected, a street show wasn’t it.

  After eight or ten of the longest heartbeats I’ve ever had, they decided they liked us. They crowded closer, laughing and clapping their hands. Some of them even tossed coins into my hat, which had landed crown down. I bet they thought I planned it that way. If I were as smart as that…If I were as smart as that, wouldn’t I have been on my way to Shqiperi?

  Hang around Max for a while and he starts to rub off on you.

  Because they liked us, we had to play our parts longer than we’d planned on-not that we’d done much in the way of planning. Max took some liberties with me that a real wheelbarrow would have slapped his face for. I would have slapped him myself, except our audience thought he was the funniest thing in the world, and they would have done worse than slap us if they hadn’t. The customer is always right, especially when he’s armed and dangerous.

  At last, the wheelbarrow got rebellious and started kicking in the traces like a restive mule. One of those kicks almost made a mule out of Max-trifle with my dignity, would he? The crowd ate it up. I wiggled myself free of him and flipped to my feet, and we both took our bows.

  Instead of mutilating us, the Lokrians pounded our backs, clasped our hands, and gave us nips of what had inflamed them. Not only that, when I picked up my hat I found we’d made damn near five leptas in silver. One of the rioters spoke fragments of Schlepsigian. When I made him understand we were staying at Papa Ioannakis’, he and his pals undertook to escort us back there.

  The hostel was closed up tight, with shutters over the ground-floor windows and an enormous padlock on the front door. Riots are a fact of life in Lakedaimon. People get ready for them, the way they get ready for earthquakes. They do less damage that way.

  A clerk came out on a second-story balcony. He shouted down at the crowd. They shouted up at him. So did I-he spoke Narbonese. He came down the fire escape to the first-floor balcony, then lowered a cast-iron stairway to the ground. Max and I went up the stairs. None of our riotous friends followed. I don’t know what the clerk told them-maybe that he’d turn them into prawns if they tried. He would have needed something interesting and memorable to keep them down on the sidewalk. Whatever it was, it worked.

  As soon as we got up to the first balcony, he hauled up the fire escape after us. Only then did he allow himself a sigh of relief. Cadogan the lion-tamer would have been proud of him. He hadn’t shown fear in front of the wild animals. They’ll turn on you every time if you do.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  “Not at all,” he answered politely. “We would lose our reputation if we lost our customers.” Around the corner, a woman screamed and kept on screaming. The hostel clerk winced. “This uproar, it is a misfortune.” In Narbonese, things don’t sound so bad as they really are. Max knows several languages, but that isn’t one of them. It doesn’t fit in with the way he thinks.

  “A misfortune, yes.” I admired the understatement, and the cool way he brought it out. “What will you do about the, ah, uproar?”

  “Myself? Try to stay safe. In aid of which, shall we go up?” The clerk led Max and me to the second-story balcony, and then in through the window to the room it adjoined. As he did, he went on, “My kingdom? My kingdom will wait till things subside, then catch a few ringleaders and plunderers and hang them. And after that?” He shrugged a resigned shrug. “After that, we shall start getting ready for the next time things turn-lively.”

  I nodded to the stout middle-aged woman whose room that happened to be. Max gave her one of his deep and startling bows. Then we were out in the hall, for all the world as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And so it seemed-except even there the air smelled of smoke.

  “Tonight’s supper specialty”-the clerk took a certain somber pride in making five full syllables out of that-“is lamb with garlic and rosemary. I trust you will find it to your liking.” He was working hard to pretend everything was normal, too.

  “I’m sure we will,” I said, and I was-nothing wrong with Papa Ioannakis’ kitchens. But I couldn’t ignore the riots, however much I wanted to. For one thing, that poor woman was still screaming, loud enough for me to hear her in the hallway through a closed door (and, by now, probably a closed window, too). For another…“How long do you expect the, ah, uproar to last? We have a ship to catch in a couple of days.”

  “As for the uproar, one never knows. It could peter out tonight, or it could go on for a week. Such is life.” He shrugged again. “As for the ship…Which is it, and from which quay does it sail?” When I told him, he did more than wince: He blanched. “The Quay of the Poxed Trollop? Sir, even without the disturbances you would do better to stay away. That is no place for honest men.”

  In that case, Max and I were better suited to the quay than he suspected. With a shrug of my own, I said, “We have to get to Shqiperi, and that seems to be the fastest way.”

  “To Shqiperi?” Lokrians don’t like Shqipetari. I mean, they really don’t like Shqipetari. I’d just put us beyond the pale. “On your heads be it-and it will.” The clerk stalked off.

  “What was that all about?” Max asked. I didn’t much want to give him the gist, but I didn’t see what choice I had. After I translated, he gave me one of those looks you should only get from a wife. “You didn’t listen to me when I told you we were putting our heads on the block. Will you listen to him?”

  “If I didn’t listen to you, why should I listen to some clerk at a hostel?”

  “Because he knows what he’s talking about?” Max is full of uncouth and unlikely suggestions.

  “If he knew what he was talking about, he’d have too much money to be a clerk at a hostel,” I said firmly. “In fact, if he says something like that, it’s a pretty good sign he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” My logic impressed me.

  For some unaccountable reason, it failed to impress Max. “Hmm,” he said. “And just what do you know about the Shqipetari that makes you such an expert?”

  “I know they need a king,” I answered. “And I know their king needs an aide-de-camp. Are you coming or aren’t you?”

  “Oh, I’ll come,” he said, doleful as usual. “If I didn’t, you’d just drag somebody off the street-though where you’d find anyone this side of that Manolis fellow to fit into that captain’s uniform is beyond me.” He shook his head. “If you went and got someone who didn’t know you’re a maniac killed, I’d feel bad about it afterwards.”

  “How about if I went and got myself killed?”

  “Well, that, too-a little.”

  The riots eased off before we had to go looking for the good ship Gamemeno. From everything I’ve learned since, this was more luck than design. The constabulary didn’t help much, because half of them were on one side and half on the other. And the King of Lokris didn’t dare call out the army, because half of it was on one side and half on the other. Like I say, Lokrians form factions the way Schlepsigians form drinking clubs, the only difference being that Schlepsigian drinking clubs don’t usually go after one another with cutlery.

  So if the charming people of Lakedaimon wanted to go on murdering and raping and burning down chunks of their town, Eliphalet only knows what would have stopped them. Something else caught their fancy-a scandalous new dancer, I think it was-and they quit.

  That clerk was on duty when we checked out. He rolled his eyes-partly, I suppose, at our getup. “I hope I don’t read about your case in one of our journa
ls,” he said. I’ve had more encouraging good-byes. All things considered, it was lucky he and Max couldn’t talk to each other. They would have got on much too well.

  Our getup…If the Quay of the Poxed Trollop was as charming a place as everybody said it was, we had two ways to approach it. We could try to blend in with the local lowlifes and seem invisible. Or we could be so gaudy and ostentatious that nobody-I dared hope-would presume to bother us.

  Max blended in with the Lokrians the way oil blends with water. Come to that, I look about as much like a Lokrian as a camel looks like a unicorn-er, as a unicorn looks like a camel. You get the idea.

  Since we couldn’t blend, we had gaudy forced on us. I put on my acrobat’s rig, while Max wore the Super Grand High Panjandrum’s uniform that was so much more effective in places where real generals didn’t dress like escapees from comic opera. The uniform did help us flag a cab. By the way the hackman bowed and scraped as he opened the door, he probably thought we were the Schlepsigian minister to Lokris and his military attachй. He was apologetic for knowing only a bit of Narbonese-that and Albionese are the foreign languages a Lokrian is most likely to speak.

  “Quite all right, my good man,” I said in Narbonese, and he brightened. Then I told him, “Please be so kind as to take us to the Quay of the Poxed Trollop.”

  Have you ever tossed a big chunk of ice into hot fat to congeal it on the instant? If you haven’t, you won’t understand what the hackman’s face did when I said that. “The…Quay of the Poxed Trollop, sir?” he wheezed. By the way he sounded, an invisible man was doing a pretty good job of strangling him.