Max coughed again. To tell you the truth, I felt like coughing myself. I wondered how long I would have lasted inside a dragon. Not as long as that vampire lasted inside the sea serpent, I suspected. Of course, under those circumstances, not lasting seemed preferable.
Essad Pasha bowed to me. “Here, your Highness, set in silver and on a silver chain, is the scale of the great worm you slew.” I bowed in return, and slid it down under my tunic. I wear it to this day.
Count Rappaport made a noise down deep in his throat: a low growl I would have thought to hear from Vuk Nedic. Rappaport’s silly uniform and sugary voice said one thing, his eyes and his manner something else again. It is often so with officials of the Dual Monarchy. If they were as foolish as they seemed, their kingdom empire would have crumbled to dust long, long ago.
“I shall have to make out a full report for my government,” the count said, in the tones of a judge passing sentence.
“When you do, make sure you write in it that I will be crowned tomorrow,” I said. “By all means come to the ceremony, your Excellency.”
“I would not miss it.” Count Rappaport bowed stiffly. He clicked his heels (he did a much smoother job of it than Untergraf Horst-Gustav, too). And then he did the best thing he could have done: he went away.
“I am sorry you were subjected to that, your Highness,” Essad Pasha said. “Please accept my apologies.”
“Your Excellency, you did nothing wrong,” I told him. “As for the Narbo”-a word the Hassocki will use for anyone who follows the Two Prophets and believes Eliphalet more sacred than Zibeon, whether actually Narbonese or not-“I will tread the unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him.”
“May it be so. North and south, east and west, may all his plans stumble and fall.” Essad Pasha’s fuming could hardly have been more visible if he’d puffed on a pipe. “You, a Schlepsigian! The very idea!” He threw back his head and laughed.
“A ridiculous notion,” Max agreed. He wouldn’t unbend far enough to seem relieved Essad Pasha thought so, but he did sound less ironic than usual.
“It is indeed, most valiant Yildirim,” Essad Pasha said. “One might as well suspect you of coming from Schlepsig, eh?”
“Me? I would sooner cut my throat.” Max drew his sword. Instead of slicing it across his neck, he swallowed a goodly length of the blade. Essad Pasha’s pouchy eyes bulged. All around the chamber, talk dried up as people turned to stare. Max might have created a bigger sensation by dropping his pants. On the other hand, he might not have.
With all eyes on him, Max withdrew the blade, conscientiously dried it on a napkin, and sheathed it once more. Then he took a skewer of chunks of fried meat. Everyone in the large room inhaled at once. I was glad to be quick; otherwise, there might not have been any air left. He pulled off the first gobbet with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Everyone exhaled, a bit regretfully. The show was over-for the moment, anyhow.
“Truly, your Highness, your aide-de-camp is a man of parts,” Essad Pasha remarked in the much too calm tones a man will use only when trying his best not to show how shaken or impressed he is.
“I would not deny it for a moment, your Excellency. Some of those parts, however, are wont to be more useful than others.” If the slightest of edges came into my own voice, well, who could blame me for that?
Max bowed low, first to me and then to Essad Pasha, as if we’d paid him undoubted compliments. “I seek to show what any who oppose his Highness may expect,” he said.
Essad Pasha bowed almost as low as Max had, which, considering the belly hindering him, wasn’t easy. “That is well said,” he boomed. “North and south, east and west, that is very well said.” He turned to me. “You are fortunate in your servants.”
“Yes, I know,” I said blandly. Max coughed. I hadn’t expected anything else. “Good thing you didn’t do that with the sword in there,” I murmured.
“Not like I haven’t done it before,” he answered, and I knew that was true. “I spit red when it happens, so I don’t spit for a while then, that’s all.”
“Such a gentleman,” I told him. His bow was even deeper than the last one.
Count Potemkin came shambling up to me then, a glass in each hand, his eyes glittering, his earth-apple of a nose as red as if it grew on a tree. “You gave the lout from the Dual Monarchy his comeuppance,” he said in elegant, accentless Narbonese. Most Tverski nobles are fluent in it, which is fortunate, for it saves other people the bother of learning their language. Tverski has more cases than Caledonia Yard, and a battery of choking and gargling noises that make a man speaking it sound as if he’s trying to strangle himself.
I speak good Narbonese myself, so I understood him. Halim Eddin, however, was more limited. “Do you speak Schlepsigian?” I asked Count Potemkin in that language.
“Only if I must,” he answered grumpily. In Schlepsigian, he had a Tverski accent, and a strong one. He translated his comment. It sounded much ruder than it had before. Maybe it lost-or gained-something in the translation. Or maybe Narbonese puts a veneer of false politeness on almost anything. Not by accident is it the language of diplomacy…for now. As a good Schlepsigian patriot, I dare hope a change is coming.
But that is by the way. I had to find some diplomatic (oh, well) way to respond. “I am who I am,” I said, with which not even the bibulous Potemkin could disagree. “I have the duty to defend myself and what is to be my kingdom.”
“Your kingdom? Pah!” Count Potemkin said. Some Tverskis make a sport of being rude. Maybe Potemkin was one of those. Or maybe he was drunk. Then again, maybe he’d seen more of Shqiperi than I thought and was giving his honest opinion. You never can tell. Whatever the answer to that riddle, he went on, “Leave Vlachia and Belagora alone, and Tver will not trouble you.”
“How generous!” I exclaimed, wondering if he could recognize sarcasm (at that moment, I wasn’t altogether convinced he could recognize himself). But that sounded like something the Poglavnik of Tver’s representative would say. Tver thinks of itself as the big brother of the Plovdivians, the Vlachs (in both Vlachia and Belagora), and the Vlachs’ close cousins the Hrvats. They all speak related languages, and they’re all Zibeonites except the Hrvats, who have the good sense to accept Eliphalet’s primacy.
Using this big brotherdom as an excuse, Tver has fought a lot of wars with the Hassockian Empire, and won most of them. Since Tver would have to charge all the way across the Nekemte Peninsula to get at Shqiperi, I wasn’t too worried about Potemkin’s threat, if that was what it was.
Count Rappaport probably wouldn’t take such a relaxed view of it. There is no Kingdom of Hrvatsk. There hasn’t been one for centuries, ever since the Hrvats suffered through their disastrous vowel famine. The Hrvats live in the Dual Monarchy. So do some Vlachs. So do some Torinans. So do the Yagmars. So do most of the Schlepsigians who don’t live in Schlepsig. So do the Voslaks and the Voslenes, who are not the same (though only they care). So do the Prahans, who aren’t quite the same as the Voslaks (or is it the Voslenes?), either. So do some Dacians, and all the Gdanskers who don’t live in Schlepsig or Tver (no more Kingdom of Gdansk, either, which is what you get for ending up stuck between Schlepsig and Tver and the Dual Monarchy). So do…I could go on.
It’s a complicated place-or, if you’d rather, just a bloody mess.
So when Tver appoints itself the Hrvats’ big brother, the king-emperor of the Dual Monarchy is just as Not Amused as the late Queen of Albion. I don’t mean she was Not Amused at the Hrvats; I’d bet money she never once heard of them. But I suppose she had other things not to amuse her.
Potemkin was thinking. It took a while. You could watch the wheels turn, like the ones on a milk wagon pulled by a lazy horse. In due course, he said, “You trouble our friends, we trouble you.”
I put my hand on the blue velvet sleeve of his jacket. “I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear fellow,” I said. I might do it, but I had better things to dream about.
/> “Don’t touch the coat!” He shook me off. “You listen and you listen good, or you be sorry.” Yes, he was what Tver calls a diplomat.
“I’m all ears,” I assured him. “North and south, east and west, I am nothing but ears. Even my eyes are ears. Even my toenails are ears.”
Those wheels inside Count Potemkin’s head slowly started turning once more. This time, I watched them stop: Potemkin gave up thinking as a bad job. “You listen,” he said again. “Maybe you lucky, coming out here to middle of nowhere. When Tver takes Vyzance, no room for Hassocki princes there no more.”
He could have said it better in Narbonese, I’m sure. Bad grammar aside, what he meant was plain enough. Tver has always lusted after the capital of the Hassockian Empire the way a callow boy lusts after a stage actress. She might be a clapped-out old whore-Eliphalet will testify Vyzance is-but he doesn’t know that, or care. All he knows is, he wants her.
I yawned in Count Potemkin’s face. “The Tverski who will lay hold of Vyzance has not been born, nor has his grandfather’s grandfather.” Switching to Hassocki, I went on, “So take thyself off, thou infinite and endless liar, thou hourly promise-breaker, thou owner of no one good quality.”
“Whoreson mandrake, thy pisspot kingdom is the canker of a calm world and a long peace, and thou provest thyself fit to rule it,” he retorted in the same language, and lumbered away.
You just can’t tell with some people, that’s all.
Taken as a whole, I suppose the evening at the fortress was a success. Nobody challenged anyone else to a duel. And no one except Barisha and the delightful Potemkin threatened to go to war. (As if anyone who didn’t have the influence to escape being consigned to Peshkepiia would have the influence to send his kingdom to war!) Even more to the point, as far as I was concerned, no one except Count Rappaport doubted I was who I said I was, and no one seemed to take him seriously.
When I went to the Metropolis’ dining room for breakfast, a pack of ministers semiplenipotentiary and another pack of scribes set upon me. I wished they would have found satisfaction in one another. Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland, for instance, talked enough to keep any four men or eight scribes happy. But no. I was the man of the hour, and they all were either mad to talk to me or to hear me talk.
“Just what you always wanted, our Highness,” Max said with a sour smirk in his voice. That would have stung had it held less truth. Being the man of the hour was what I’d always wanted. Be careful what you want, then-you may get it.
You may also eventually get breakfast. None of Hoxha’s cooks challenged any of the others to a duel, either, though they constantly seemed on the edge of it. Coffee, fried fowl, fried eggs, fried bread (which surprised me by proving tasty), fried sausage (which surprised me by proving even nastier than I expected, and I thought I was braced for the wurst). Everyone kept on telling me things or shouting questions at me while I ate. I wasn’t king yet, so I couldn’t even order people beheaded.
For that matter, I didn’t know where I would be crowned (or even coronated-yes, Bob was there). I didn’t know where my palace was, either. Peshkepiia didn’t seem the sort of place that had palaces hidden away up back alleys.
I headed for the fortress to find Essad Pasha. And I did: he was heading for the hostel to find me. “Your Highness,” he said, bowing low.
“Your Excellency.” I bowed back. Essad Pasha’s bodyguards and Max bowed to one another. It was all very polite. When men carrying a variety of lethal hardware meet on the street, politeness is to be admired and desired. I went on, “I was coming to ask you about the coronation ceremony.”
“Well, good, because I was coming to tell you about it.” Essad Pasha looked as affable as a senior officer in the army of the Hassockian Empire was likely to look unless he was plotting something really nefarious. “What would you like to know?”
“Where will it be, to begin with?” I said. “And where will I dwell once I wear the crown?”
“And will his Majesty’s harem dwell there as well?” Max added. “He is too much a gentleman to speak of such things on his own, but naturally it is a matter rousing some curiosity on his part.”
Rousing, indeed. If it didn’t rouse some curiosity on Max’s part, and if I didn’t know which part of Max was roused, I would have been very surprised. None of which meant my sword-swallowing aide-de-camp was mistaken. Those questions did rouse my curiosity, among other things.
And Essad Pasha seemed to find all the questions reasonable enough. “You will be crowned, naturally, in the Quadrate God’s fane,” he replied. “That way, your mystical affinity with the land you are to rule will spread north and south, east and west, over the entire kingdom. So may it be.”
“So may it be,” I echoed. After two terms in the Hassockian Army, I thought I knew enough about the Quadrate God’s rituals so I wouldn’t give myself away.
“As for your residence,” Essad Pasha went on, “if you would be so kind as to come with me…”
Off we went, into the back alleys of Peshkepiia. We strode through a market square that had some of the sorriest meat and vegetables and leather goods and, well, everything else, too, that I’d ever seen. It also had the largest assortment of coins passing current that I’d ever seen-probably that anyone has ever seen. Most likely because Shqiperi doesn’t coin for itself, everyone’s money is good here. You see everything from Hassocki piasters to Albionese shillings and even shekels from Vespucciland across the sea. If someone came out of the mountains after digging up a hoard of Aenean silver, that wouldn’t have fazed the merchants. They all had scales-and, no doubt, all had their thumbs on them whenever they thought they could get away with it.
Peshkepiia’s sewage system is largely a matter of rumor. I was repeatedly glad Hassockian Army uniform includes knee-high boots. We did considerable squelching. Some of the things we walked through…Well, I didn’t get a good look at them, and I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t.
Essad Pasha paused. “Behold, Your Highness-Your Majesty very soon to be-your palace. I hope it pleases you.”
May Eliphalet’s curse smite me with boils if it didn’t. There it was: a real palace-a little one, but without a doubt a palace-right where I’d never dreamt there could be any such thing. It was charming, even elegant, in the sinuous Hassocki style. And if there was a wigmaker’s shop across the muddy street and a horseleech’s establishment next door-somehow that added to the charm instead of taking away from it.
“How did it get here?” I asked. I probably would have asked the same question the same way if I’d seen a daffodil sprouting from a cow flop. Given Peshkepiia’s general atmosphere, that was more likely than this.
“I believe a governor built it some years ago for his lady love,” Essad Pasha answered. “So I was told when I came to Shqiperi, anyhow.”
“Why were you living in the fortress and not here, your Excellency?” Max asked: a much more bluntly sensible query than the one I’d come up with. Max is a useful fellow. You never need to think the worst of anyone while he’s around, since he’ll do it for you.
Essad Pasha coughed once or twice himself-he doesn’t do it as well as Max-and sent me what might have been a look of appeal. I pretended either not to notice it or to misunderstand it. “Yes, why were you?” I asked, as if that were simply the most interesting question I’d ever heard in my life.
He thought about telling some spun-sugar fairy tale. Then, of themselves, his eyes went to Max’s sword. Max’s hand wasn’t on the hilt, but it wasn’t far away. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, as an Albionese poet once said, conscience being the still, small voice that tells us someone may call us a damned liar. That last definition comes from a Schlepsigian actor, acrobat, showman, soldier of fortune, and-briefly-king.
Instead of spinning the fairy tale, Essad Pasha said, “I judged the fortress more secure. But, with a proper guard contingent and with popular goodwill, your Highness-your Majesty soon, as I say-should be more than safe enough here.”
> More than safe enough for whom? I wondered. The only thing Essad Pasha knew about popular goodwill was that he’d never had any. “The harem is already installed here?” I asked him.
He brightened. “Oh, yes, your Highness. The quarters are admirable for the purpose. That governor may have built this palace for one favorite, but he entertained the possibility of entertaining more here.” He sent me a manly smirk.
I also pretended not to notice that. For once, I found a relevant question ahead of Max: “The royal treasury is already installed here?”
Essad Pasha looked as if my intrepid aide-de-camp had just sliced off the first two inches of his manhood and was poised to take more (assuming he had more). Again, he seemed poised to lie. Again, he decided lying wasn’t a good idea; I would have no trouble checking. “Ah, not yet,” he said in slightly strangled tones.
“You will attend to that at once, your Excellency, won’t you?” I bore down on the last two words. I didn’t say what would happen if Essad Pasha failed to attend to it at once. Sometimes it’s better to let a man use his imagination. Even someone like Essad Pasha, seemingly born without any such thing, can, when pressed, form the most remarkable pictures in his mind.
“Yes, your Highness.” He sounded resigned if not transported with delight.
“Good,” I said. “For if I am to be king here, I shall be king here. North and south, east and west, this land and all in it are mine. And it will have a proper coinage.” I scratched at my mustaches. I rather fancied my face on silver and gold, I did. Instead of saying so, I went on, “A proper Shqipetari coinage would go a long way towards insuring popular goodwill, eh? And towards insuring a proper guard contingent here, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Every Inch a King Page 18
