Well, almost. Shqipetari wouldn’t be Shqipetari without weapons. On their home grounds, they festooned themselves with swords-curved and straight-and crossbows and boar spears and pikes and morningstars and whatever other charming tools their imagination and their smiths could come up with. They tricked themselves out with silver chains, too, those who could afford them, so they jingled when they walked. To my mind, that made them seem less bloodthirsty, but they didn’t seem to care.
Lokrian law frowned on flaunting murder quite so openly. In Vravron, they were limited to one knife apiece. Some-most-of those knives could have done duty for ancient Aenean shortswords. Their hilts and scabbards were chaised (chased?) with silver. If a Shqipetar was somebody, he wanted you to know it.
They eyed Max and me as we got off the Gamemeno. I could flatter myself and say it was my good looks, but more likely it was Max’s inches. They were big men, yes, but not many overtopped me and none came close to Max.
“You should have worn your sword,” I told him, even if wearing it would have been illegal. “Then they would think you were one of them.”
“Just what I always wanted,” he said.
Finding out where Vravron’s crystallography office was proved a trial. None of the Lokrians we ran into admitted to speaking any language but his own, which did us no good. When the Shqipetari talked among themselves, it sounded as if they were trying to choke to death. No country that calls itself something like Shqiperi can be all good.
But I discovered that some of the men from the mountains knew Hassocki, while others spoke bits and pieces of Vlachian. Since Vlachians border them where Lokrians don’t, that wasn’t too surprising. Thanks to my stints in the Hassocki army, I had Hassocki and bits and pieces of Vlachian myself. We managed. I spread around a few coins, too, to encourage memories. That also helped, and they didn’t have to be very big coins. Shqipetari come to Lokris because they’re hungry.
As in Thasos, the Consolidated Crystal office in Vravron was an island of efficiency in a sea of, well, Lokrianity. Max and I got in line to send our message, and the line moved. The clerks weren’t sitting around drinking little cups of strong, syrupy-sweet coffee or smoking cigars or gabbing about women or the rowing races or whatever they do for fun in Vravron (they must do something there, I suppose). They didn’t act all high and mighty, either. If CC gets complaints about its clerks, it gets new clerks, and in a hurry, too. The people who work in those offices know it. It keeps them on their toes.
The clerk we got spoke decent Schlepsigian but better Narbonese, so we used that. I filled out forms and paid the fee, and he took me back to a crystallographer. The sorcerer-like the one in Thasos, he wore a homburg-spoke Schlepsigian at least as well as I do, though his olive skin, broad forehead, large, dark, liquid eyes, and narrow, delicate chin said he was a Lokrian. “To whom are you sending your message?” he asked.
“To Essad Pasha, in Peshkepiia, in Shqiperi,” I answered.
His eyebrows were a raven’s wings. They fluttered in surprise. “Essad Pasha serves a kingdom at war with this one,” he said. He couldn’t have been listening to the crystallographer in Thasos. I know that. We danced around the same barn even so. He warned that Lokrian wizards would examine the message. I promised it held no hostile intent. This time, unlike in Thasos, I knew the steps to the dance; I wasn’t making them up as I went along. When the mage was satisfied, he poised a pen over a pad and asked, “And the message is?”
“You speak Hassocki?” I asked in that tongue.
“Certainly, sir,” he replied, also in Hassocki. I’m good with languages, but he was better. You have to be sharp to work for Consolidated Crystal, even in a place like Vravron. Still in Hassocki, he went on, “Please go ahead.”
“Here is the message, then,” I said. “‘Arriving soon at Fushe-Kuqe. Looking forward. Halim Eddin.’”
Those raven’s wings fluttered again. “Well, well,” he murmured. I hoped he wouldn’t gossip. CC discourages that, and not many people have the nerve to do anything CC discourages. I dared hope, anyhow. I also dared hope that by keeping my message simple I wouldn’t make any errors to draw suspicion my way.
He had to use a spell to find the eight-digit number that uniquely identified Essad Pasha’s crystal-being a prominent official, the Hassocki commandant in Shqiperi had a personal crystallographer attached to him. The man in Vravron murmured the charm and the number to connect his crystal to that one.
Light flared inside the crystal on the CC man’s desk. I got a glimpse of Essad Pasha’s crystallographer in the depths of the sphere: a plump Hassocki in a fez. With only one client, he didn’t need to dress to impress.
“It is accomplished,” my crystallographer said.
“I thank you very much,” I told him. “You don’t know what you’ve done for Shqiperi.”
“To Shqiperi,” Max said. I glared at him, but the crystallographer seemed to like his version better than mine.
VII
Ah, Fushe-Kuqe! Fushe-Kuqe! Some ancient Aenean poet sang of its beauty all those years ago. I presume he had the advantage of not approaching the place in a smuggler.
Actually, it is pretty. It sits in a little sapphire-blue bay punched out of the rim of Shqiperi: the only decent harbor the country has. All around the edge of the bay and running a few miles to either side are beautiful beaches of white and golden sand. The rest of Shqiperi’s coast consists of an unappetizing mix of rocks, boulders, crags, cliffs, and out-and-out mountains, leaping straight up from the Tiberian Sea as if their shoelaces were on fire. Some of this terrain is thickly wooded. Most of it is too steep for trees; they would have to grow sideways if they grew at all.
The land rises steeply back of the bay, too, but half a mile to a mile back of it. Fushe-Kuqe runs up from the sea to the ridge line. The ancient Dalmatians-the ancestors of the Shqipetari-first fortified the place, but they did a spotty job of it, so Lokrian freebooters were able to capture it. In due course, the Dalmatians took it back, with the usual massacre to celebrate the change of ownership. The Aeneans took it away from them, and celebrated with a bigger massacre. Each new owner added new fortifications, figuring he would be there forever. Forever usually worked out to about a lifetime: over the past thousand years, Fushe-Kuqe has changed hands thirteen times.
When Tasos told that to Max, he said, “How lucky.” That left Tasos scratching his head-or maybe he did have dandruff with legs after all. But the Lokrians don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia, even if the name comes from pieces of classical Lokrian.
By then, Max was wearing the enormous Hassocki captain’s uniform he’d got from Manolis in Thasos. I had on the colonel’s outfit I’d bought there. Some of Tasos’ smugglers looked askance at us. I’d never seen a skance before, but lots of skances were flying around as we came into the harbor. If we hadn’t fought the pirates alongside them, if Max hadn’t curbed the sea serpent’s tongue, we might have gone into the harbor, all right, with rocks tied around our feet. But we had, and so, while the skances flew, they didn’t light on us.
Stagiros got us up alongside a wharf with his usual elegance. He was the best thing aboard the Gamemeno. If not for him, we likely wouldn’t have got to Fushe-Kuqe at all. He looked from Max to me and back again. “Good luck-your Majesty,” he said in flawless Hassocki.
“North and south, east and west, may good come to you from every direction,” I replied. I had to remember all the time from now on that I was a Hassocki, a follower of the Quadrate God.
What a role!
And what a risk! That started to sink in now, when it was too late to do anything about it. If even once I absentmindedly swore by Eliphalet’s whiskers or made the sign of the Two with index and middle fingers, I was a dead man, and so was Max. Stagiros gave me a small bow and an even smaller smile. I’d passed the first tiny test.
Down went the gangplank with a thud. My head would make a thud like that if something went wrong. I glanced over at Max. He was smiling, which is not something
you see every day. I wondered if our spirits had got up in the wrong bodies this morning. Me worrying? Max cheerful? The cosmic order of things was definitely out of order.
We stepped onto the pier. My worries fell away like fireballs from a dragon. Maybe, as Stagiros said, it was madness. Or maybe I realized it was too late to turn back, and I had to go on. Or maybe those two were one and the same. However it was, I knew I was in the ring again. I had my audience out there. And I had to perform.
“Here comes trouble,” Max murmured-in Hassocki. He sounded like his old self, too, but his old self in character.
I saw the trouble as soon as he did. Two Hassocki soldiers-a young lieutenant with a neat hairline mustache and an older sergeant with an enormous soup-strainer-walked toward the base of the pier. The lieutenant wore only a ceremonial sword. The sergeant carried a pike, had a much more businesslike sword and a knife on his belt, and no doubt kept some other lethal implements secreted here and there about his person.
“Let’s go,” I said to Max, and started down the pier toward them. He followed a pace behind me and a pace to my left: just where a prince’s aide-de-camp should walk. Yes, he’d thought I was crazy for a lot longer than Stagiros had. But he wasn’t about to give me away. Of course, it was his neck, too. If they decided to kill me, they weren’t what you’d call likely to leave him alone.
The lieutenant looked down at something in the palm of his left hand, up toward me, then down at his hand again. I couldn’t see what he had there, but I could make a pretty good guess. If that wasn’t another sorcerous reproduction of the portrait that had run in the Thasos Chronicle and started me off on this adventure, then I wasn’t Prince Halim Eddin.
Which I bloody well wasn’t. Except I had to be.
That lieutenant looked up at me one more time. I stopped. So did Max. He stopped breathing, too. “Your Highness?” the lieutenant said, and Max exhaled again. Now that you mention it, I did, too.
If I was going to do this, I was going to do it to the hilt. I looked down my nose at him and said, “I expected to be met by Essad Pasha himself,” in tones that should have frozen the sun.
The lieutenant was swarthy, but I could see him turn red anyhow. The look on the sergeant’s face said, I told you so. It also said, I wonder how much trouble we’re in. One thing it didn’t say was, He speaks funny Hassocki. The way I sounded seemed to satisfy the lieutenant, too. He bowed to me and said, “Please excuse us, your Highness. We were ordered to escort you to him.”
We were ordered meant, It’s not our fault. It was cleverly phrased, so much so that the sergeant smiled at him, and you don’t see an underofficer smiling at an officer every day.
“Oh, very well.” By the way I said it, I’d been planning to take their heads but I supposed-just barely supposed, mind you-it wasn’t worth the mess it would make. The sergeant’s smile flickered and blew out. I went on, “Escort us, then.”
Bowing again-more deeply this time-the lieutenant said, “Yes, your Highness. Just as you say, your Highness. Please come with us, your Highness.” His knees weren’t knocking together, but they weren’t far from it.
I glanced back at Max. My face said, I could get used to this. Without moving a muscle, his face said, You are used to this, and you’d better remember it. He’s even more annoying than usual when he’s right. We followed Essad Pasha’s soldiers (my soldiers now!) into Fushe-Kuqe.
Our guides stopped at an elegant Torinan-style building next to a temple to the Quadrate God. Torino, of course, is just on the other side of the Tiberian Sea. It’s been interested in grabbing Fushe-Kuqe and all of Shqiperi for years. This proves only one thing: the Torinans haven’t taken a very good look at the country they say they want. If they had, they wouldn’t.
Several grim-faced guards stood outside the arched doorway. They looked ready to shoot anything that moved. If it didn’t move, they looked ready to shoot it anyway, just to see if putting a couple of holes in it might get it moving-at which point, they would shoot it again.
When they saw me, they stiffened to attention. They banged their heels together-a Schlepsigian style that’s caught on in the Hassocki army. “Your Highness!” they bawled, more or less in unison. That done, they goggled at Max, who towered head and shoulders above the tallest of them. He affected not to notice they existed. They were only soldiers, after all, while he was an officer. In his own surly way, he was playing his role to the hilt, too.
I, however, was a prince. I had to notice all my people, even if I knew they were beneath me. “At ease,” I told the guards, and they relaxed their brace-about a hair’s worth. I turned back to my escorts. “Take me to Essad Pasha.”
“Yes, your Highness,” they said together. The sergeant opened the door. The lieutenant bowed and gestured. Followed by my aide-de-camp-who had to duck to get under the lintel-I preceded him into Essad Pasha’s headquarters. The sergeant came last, and closed the door behind us. That sort of thing was what soldiers were for.
Stepping lively, the lieutenant got out in front of me and led me down a corridor to an airy aerie that gave a good view of the harbor. “He’s here, your Excellency!” he said, his voice throbbing with excitement.
“Well, then, he’d better come in here, hadn’t he?” a gruff voice answered. If it held any excitement, it held it very close indeed. Max coughed. Max coughs too much for his own good, but I knew what he meant this time-something on the order of, You won’t impress this fellow with your high and mighty manners.
I didn’t see it that way. If anything would impress someone like Essad Pasha, it was a prince acting like a prince. I strode into the office and stood waiting expectantly.
Essad Pasha sat behind a businesslike desk I might have seen in an office in Schlepsig. Two ordinary chairs sat in front of it. But so did piles of fringed and tasseled velvet cushions, for those who preferred to recline Hassocki-style.
Like his aerie, Essad Pasha himself was a mixture of modern East and ancient, unchanging West. He wore a dust-brown Hassocki uniform like my own; his had a major general’s two golden stars on each shoulder strap. He was about sixty, and built like a brick. I wouldn’t have cared to tangle with him, even if I had twenty years on him. His face was broad and square, with deep lines and a fierce mustache only now going gray. His pouchy, hooded eyes said he’d seen everything and done everything, and most of it hadn’t been worth seeing or doing. They said I wasn’t worth seeing, either. Max hadn’t been far wrong.
By his military grade, Essad Pasha outranked me. But I was of the blood royal-or he thought I was-and he wasn’t. He should have treated me the way he thought I deserved. When he just sat there, my blood, royal or not, started to boil. The emotion was ersatz, but it felt real. Would Prince Halim Eddin let an underling disrespect him so? Not likely! If I was Halim Eddin, would I?
“On thy feet, dog and son of a dog!” I roared. “Truly thy mother was a bitch, and thou knowest what that makes thee! Thinkest thou thy head shall not answer for thine accursed insolence?”
Now, Essad Pasha could have been rid of us with a snap of the fingers. All he had to do was say to the lieutenant, Kill them, and we were dead men. He could have, but he didn’t. It never once crossed his mind. As soon as I started shouting at him, the color drained from his ruddy face. I guess he hadn’t counted on getting a king who intended to be a king. Truly they say the Hassocki is either at your throat or at your feet.
His chair went over with a crash. He sprang upright, probably moving faster than he had in years. “Your-Your Highness!” he gabbled. “Forgive me, your Highness! North and south, east and west, I meant no harm, I meant no insult. Let the God look into my heart and see if I lie.”
“North and south, east and west, Essad Pasha, thou hast been too long in this far land,” I said. “Thou hast been a warrior, thou hast been a governor, but thou art not a king. Wert thou a king, didst thou purpose becoming a king, wouldst thou have summoned me?”
Even though I wasn’t flinging direct insults at hi
m any more, I kept on using the second-person intimate, which was insulting all by itself to one who was neither a close friend nor a small child. I did it as if I had the right to do it. And because I did it that way, I won the right to do it.
I turned to Max. “Yildirim!” I said, giving him a Hassocki name on the spur of the moment. Maybe I was thinking of the first ship we rode, for it means thunderbolt. “Your sword, Yildirim!”
Out it came, the edge glittering. Once again, it did the trick. “Mercy, your Highness!” Essad Pasha wailed. “I abase myself before you, your Highness!” And may Eliphalet turn his back on me if the old bandit chief didn’t, going down first on his knees and then on his belly, bending his head and baring the nape of his neck. “Let your man strike now, by the God, if I mean to do you harm!”
Max took one loud, thumping step forward. “Your Highness?” he inquired, as if to say my will was the only thing in the world holding him back.
Executing the man who’d invited me-or rather, my double-here might have caused talk, especially when it would be for no more reason than that he stood up more slowly than he should have. On the other hand, the Hassocki respected shows of willful fury. I really could get used to this, I thought.
“Put up, Yildirim,” I said with a sigh, and his sword slid back into its sheath. I turned back to Essad Pasha. “Rise,” I told him. “You are forgiven-this time. There had better not be another.”
When he got to his feet, his face was the color of yogurt. Cold sweat beaded his forehead. He breathed in great, hitching gasps. He was used to putting others in fear; it must have been a long time since anyone turned the tables on him. “Truly-your Highness-is a lion-of righteousness,” he got out, a few words at each gasp.
I’d been lyin’ every inch of the way to get this far. But righteousness? Brother! “Be so good as to remember it henceforward,” I said. I hadn’t even been crowned yet, but I felt every inch a king.
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