“Er-so it may.” Now Essad Pasha sounded distinctly less than overjoyed. He must have got used to the idea that Shqiperi’s treasury was his treasury. To have a stranger announce that the kingdom was going to use it-and that the stranger wanted to get his own hands on it-couldn’t have sat well.
I pondered. If I said he could keep some, he would hold on to more than I said he could. He would also think me weak for yielding to him in any way. That was dangerous. If I tried to cut him off without a piaster, I ran the risk of a knife in the kidneys or ground glass in the breading of whatever the Shqipetari cooks fried next. That was also dangerous. More dangerous? Less? How could I judge?
Audacity. Audacity again. Always audacity. Some Narbonese politician said that. If memory serves, he got his head bitten off a couple of years later, but if you’re going to fret about every little thing… Besides, he was just a fool of a Narbonese (but I repeat myself). If I hadn’t had more audacity than I knew what to do with, I wouldn’t have been moments away from becoming one of the crowned heads of the world. And so-on with it.
Besides, I had a really demonic thought. “I will tell the scribes you’re making the transfer,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be interested in watching it and writing about it. Aren’t you? They’ll probably want to peek into the chests to see all the gold and silver. You should let them, to make sure nobody has any doubts about anything.”
I waited. The longer I waited, the less patient my face got. The longer the silence stretched, the closer Max’s hand drew to the hilt of his sword-in a polite sort of way, of course. Why, certainly!
Essad Pasha looked at me. He took another long look at Max’s right hand. And then he surprised me. He threw back his head and laughed like a loon, or perhaps like a scribe. “Your Highness-your Majesty-I think serving under you will be a real privilege. And I would like to see the face of the first fellow fool enough to try to cross you. North and south, east and west, there will be no escaping your wrath.” He laughed again, even more raucously. “And that whoreson malt-horse drudge who styles himself a count of the Dual Monarchy! That poor inch of nature proves himself of no account whenever he opens his mouth to speak. Fond witling, to imagine you some sort of mad Narbo. No infidel Schlepsigian dog would have the wit to stymie me-me!-at every turn. See? I speak frankly and openly. I own myself stymied.”
Max coughed. I smiled, doing my best to make my teeth seem sharper than they were. Audacity. Audacity again. Always audacity. “Any man who admits to being stymied-who brags of being stymied-surely has some scheme to stymie the stymier. When I come back to the palace after my coronation, the first thing I aim to do is examine the treasury. If anything seems wrong in even the slightest way, Essad Pasha, north and south, east and west, there will be no escaping my wrath. Is that plain enough, or shall I speak more clearly?”
“That is very plain,” Essad Pasha answered. “And I have no such scheme. Of that you may rest assured. May my head answer if I lie.”
He’d just put his scheme back on the shelf. Of that I might rest assured. If he came up with another one he thought he could get away with, he would use it. Of that I might rest assured, too. “Shall we go back down to the hostel and the fane?” I said. “It should be about time for the ceremony to begin. And I do need a moment to tell those scribes about the transfer of the treasury. Watching all the sparkly things move is bound to fascinate them.”
“No doubt it will, as with any jackdaws,” Essad Pasha said with a martyred sigh. “Well, your Highness-your Majesty-you are right. It is time to return to the hostel and the holy fane. And of course you may tell the scribes whatever brings your heart delight.” He sighed again. “After all, if I tried to stop you, you would anyhow.”
I did tell the pack about the treasury. That yielded even more chaos and commotion and entertainment than I hoped it would. All the scribes tried to figure out how to be two places at once. Since even demons have trouble with this, to say nothing of the greatest sorcerers of our age and every other, it handily defeated the gaggle of second- and third-rate scribes who’d come to this fourth-rate town hoping for a first-rate story.
My story.
Some of them rushed off to the Consolidated Crystal office (yes, even a fourth-rate town like Peshkepiia has one-CC is everywhere) to file both stories before either one of them happened. This would have been a miracle, if not necessarily one of rare device.
Other scribes proved perfectly suited for the Nekemte Peninsula, where perhaps the commonest sound in the land is that of one hand…washing another. They formed quick impromptu teams. One man would keep an eye on the treasury transfer while the other kept an eye on me. Each would write a story. Both would file both stories. Not quite a miracle, but something that would look like one for the home crowd. Very often, that’s more than good enough.
And then there was poor Bob. None of his countrymen wanted to team with him. No doubt they’d seen him in action-or inaction-before. He couldn’t team with anyone from a different kingdom, because he spoke only Albionese. By the way he spoke, he didn’t have much command of his allegedly native tongue, either.
“What would you do in my fix, your Highness?” he asked lugubriously.
Run away, change my name, and try to pretend the whole thing never happened, I thought. Or maybe I’d just slit my wrists. But, since Halim Eddin didn’t speak Albionese, I didn’t have to understand him. “North and south, east and west, thy fame hath gone before thee,” I told him in Hassocki. He followed not a word of it, but Essad Pasha laughed and Max very nearly smiled.
I had no royal robes to don. With the Hassockian Empire at war with so many of its neighbors, no one thought my colonel’s uniform out of place. Considering what the members of the diplomatic corps were wearing, I was among the most modestly attired men going into the Quadrate God’s fane. I’d thought the diplomats were gaudy the night before-and I’d been right, too. They were even gaudier now.
Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland wore black jacket, black cravat, black trousers, and white shirt. But the shirt, as was usual for a Narbonese, was a sea of ruffles. He had a scarlet sash draped from his right shoulder to his left hipbone, a glowing turquoise sash draped from his left shoulder to his right hipbone, and an iridescent green sash doing duty for a cummerbund.
Vuk Nedic of Vlachia wore wolfskin dyed purple-spectacular, but not a success. Barisha of Belagora had on a uniform of golden watered silk that should have made a lovely evening gown for a lovely lady. Inside the fancy clothes, he himself remained a Vlachian semisavage. And Count Rappaport still found a way to upstage him. The noble from the Dual Monarchy looked as if he’d killed and skinned a candy cane, or possibly like a barber pole with legs and enameled decorations. However ludicrous the getup, his eyes still saw everything and believed nothing.
After I saw him, I stopped paying attention to the other diplomats. I assumed no one could outdo that uniform (if something so obviously one of a kind could be dignified by the name), and I was…almost right. I’d reckoned without the Quadrate God’s votary.
He wore cloth of gold heavily encrusted with pearls and precious stones. His robes must have weighed more than a good suit of chainmail; I marveled that he could walk at all. His curly gray beard, which tumbled down as far as the bottom of his chest, hid some of the mystic symbols on the front of the robe. His long, flowing locks, tumbling down under a miter as massive as a battle helm and far shinier, covered up whatever ornamented his shoulders and upper back.
He smelled strongly of himself (votaries of the Quadrate God bathe once a year whether they need to or not, and I’d say his time was just about up) and just as strongly of sandalwood. The latter scent warred with but failed to defeat the former. Behind him, less gorgeously robed acolytes swung thuribles north and south, east and west. Their scented smoke was spicy with the exotic odors of frankincense and myrrh. But what came from their censers failed to censor what came from the votary (and the acolytes’ hides hadn’t met soap and water any time lately, either).
“If they put a perfumery next to a place where they pour fertilizer into sacks…” Max whispered.
“That’s holiness you smell,” I said.
“Well, they ought to keep it on ice in the summertime,” Max said. “It’s gone off.”
A horrible noise burst from a set of risers to our left. No, they weren’t throwing cats into bubbling oil there, even if it sounded like that. It was a chorus of Shqipetari boys, singing my praises. So they told me afterwards, anyhow. I hate to think what they would have sounded like if they’d disapproved of me.
One boy wore a red robe, the next a black, and so on. The boy on the next step up wore a robe of the color opposite the one just below him. If you can imagine a singing checkerboard…Well, if you can imagine a singing checkerboard, I’m sorry for you, but we had one there. They also told me red and black were the colors of the Kingdom of Shqiperi. Since there wouldn’t be any Kingdom of Shqiperi till that odorous priest plopped a crown on my head, I wondered how they knew, but I didn’t ask them.
The song of praise ended on a truly alarming high note. I later found out one of the boys chose that moment to goose another, one he didn’t like. At the time, I assumed it was part of the song. The silence that fell afterwards seemed slightly stunned, but any silence was welcome then.
It didn’t last. How many welcome things do? The votary began to pray, first in Hassocki and then in Geez, the ancient holy language worshipers of the Quadrate God use. They seem to think him too ignorant to understand any more recent tongue. To me, this is not flattering to a putatively all-powerful deity, but the Quadrate God’s followers have never sought my opinion on the subject.
Every so often, the votary would pause and look my way. I would throw in a “So may it be” or a “He is wise and he is just” or a “North and south, east and west.” I spoke Hassocki, which was all right; not being a votary or acolyte, I didn’t have to know any Geez. And, as I say, I’d been to enough of these services to have a pretty good idea what to drop in when. I didn’t make any mistakes bad enough for the votary to start screaming, This is a filthy Narbo masquerading as a Hassocki prince! Boil him in tartar sauce!
When the prayers finally finished, he looked at me again. This time, he looked into me. It was an alarming sensation. He Knew. If you travel with a circus, even a run-down outfit like Dooger and Cark’s, you get to recognize that look. It does people who Know less good than you’d think. So what if you Know the answer, when you can’t find the right questions to ask? If Knowing mattered, those wizards and fortunetellers would be rich and comfortable and maybe even happy, not stuck performing for wages a bricklayer would scorn.
This holy man didn’t find the right question, either. When he looked inside me, he didn’t try to see anything like, Why is this filthy Narbo masquerading as a Hassocki prince? or even, Why is he thinking in Schlepsigian and not Hassocki? He must not have noticed that, though I think I would have. But what he wanted to find out was, What kind of King of Shqiperi will he make?
By the way his eyes widened, even that seemed lively enough. “Five,” he spluttered, and then repeated it-“Five!”-in even more astonished tones. And then his eyes didn’t just widen. They rolled up in his head, and he fell over in a faint.
Someone splashed him with water, possibly holy, possibly not. Someone else, more practical, put a flask to his lips. He slurped noisily. I hope he left one drop in there, keeping with the letter of his faith if not the spirits, but he was so thorough sucking up those spirits that I couldn’t be sure.
“Are you better, your Reverence?” one of the acolytes asked. “What did you see?”
“He will be a strong king,” the votary declared. He was pretty strong himself, but you didn’t hear people telling him about it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Essad Pasha nodding. I really had convinced him I was what I said I was. Of course, as long as he believed that, he didn’t have to believe he’d let a Schlepsigian mountebank play him for a jackass. Believing me the genuine article made him feel better about himself. Since it also went a long way toward keeping my head on my shoulders, I didn’t mind a bit.
Essad Pasha gestured. At a wedding in a country where the bride and groom follow the Two Prophets, a ringbearer brings up the ring on a velvet cushion. Here, a crownbearer did the same duty. He was a pretty little boy, except that his eyebrows grew together above the bridge of his nose. In Shqiperi, though, this is accounted a mark of beauty among men and women alike.
The votary lifted up the crown. He set it on my head. It was heavier than I’d expected-gold has a way of doing that. “It is accomplished!” the votary cried. “Behold the King of Shqiperi!” He meant me. People cheered. They meant me, too. Acting on the stage? Forget it! I acted before the world-and the world applauded!
XI
What is your first command for your subjects, your Majesty?” Essad Pasha asked.
I paused a moment to strike a pose. The scribes poised pens and pencils above notepads. A sketch artist recorded my likeness in a few quick strokes. Before long, the laws of similarity and contagion would send my image all over the civilized world. I wondered how many weeks or months it would take to reach the outlying districts of Shqiperi.
“Hear me, my subjects!” I boomed. Fanes to the Quadrate God don’t have the acoustics of temples to the Two Prophets, but a performer learns how to make his voice fill up the space he plays in. “Hear me! I order you to live joyfully all the rest of your days! Any who fail to obey will be severely punished!”
A brief silence followed. Some were working that out. Others were translating it for those who had no Hassocki. Only after a few heartbeats did people laugh and clap the way I hoped they would.
Essad Pasha bowed. “Indeed, a command worthy of a king!”
“North and south, east and west, may it be so,” I said grandly.
Bob the Albionese scribe was frowning. “But if he punishes them, how can they live joyfully?” he asked whoever was sitting beside him. He spoke much too loudly, a common failing of Albionese. And he wasn’t bright enough to get the joke, a common failing of scribes.
I fear Untergraf Horst-Gustav also looked puzzled. Brighter Schlepsigians have no doubt been born. Not even my kingdom would waste a capable man on Shqiperi when he could be doing something useful somewhere else. Count Rappaport got it. His only problem was, he didn’t think it was funny. He seemed too competent to belong in a backwater like this. But then, it would be just like the Dual Monarchy to send skilled diplomats to pestholes like Peshkepiia and giggling nincompoops to posts that really matter.
“For my second command…” I waited. Essad Pasha suddenly stopped breathing. If I wanted to get rid of him, if I wanted to blame him for everything that was wrong with Shqiperi, I could. I could likely get away with it, too. Although I knew much more was wrong with Shqiperi than even Essad Pasha was to blame for, I could buy myself popularity by nailing his head over the gate to my palace. “For my second command…I declare this, the day of my accession, a holiday with special rejoicing throughout the land, and I order it to be celebrated each year from now on.”
More applause, the most enthusiastic from Essad Pasha. Maybe the old villain thought I couldn’t do without him. Maybe he was even right. We never quite got to find out. Essad Pasha is dead himself these days. And I…I am the victim of an unfortunate usurpation, a king without a kingdom. Life can be very sad sometimes.
I’m getting ahead of myself again. You, dear reader, don’t know how-
And I’d better not tell you just yet, either.
What I had better tell you is that I left the fane to the acclamations of the assembled dignitaries (except for Count Rappaport and a couple of other spoilsports) and to the absolute indifference of the people of Peshkepiia. Sooner or later, I thought, I would have to learn more about these turbulent people I now ruled. And they would have to learn more about me, too. Once they did, how could they help but love me?
Guards stood outside the palac
e-the royal palace, now. People stood in the street staring at the palace. This I took for a good sign; no one had paid any attention to it before. Only one reason for the change sprang to mind.
“The treasury is here?” I asked Essad Pasha.
“But of course, your Highness,” he answered. Max coughed significantly. Essad Pasha thought it was significant, anyhow, and thought he knew the significance. “But of course, your Majesty,” he amended.
One of the basic rules in performing is that anyone of your own sex who calls you darling hates you. Anyone of any sex who says but of course is likely to be lying through his-or even her-teeth. Somehow, I didn’t think statecraft was all that different. By Max’s eyebrow semaphore, neither did he.
“Let’s see it,” I said.
I waited to see what happened next. If Essad Pasha had being difficult in mind, he would tell the guards something interesting-something like, “Kill them,” for instance. In which case I would not only be the first King of Shqiperi but also very possibly the last, and certainly the one with the shortest reign. Not a set of records I really wanted to hold.
I told myself that, in the event of my sudden untimely demise, Essad Pasha’s departure from this life would be every bit as abrupt. I hoped Max was telling himself the same thing. You never know with Max till something happens-if it happens.
Was Essad Pasha making the same calculations from the other side, as it were? If he was, he made them in a hurry. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, and nodded to the guards.
Waiting inside was…Well, if it were a squad of crossbowmen, I wouldn’t be writing this reminiscence, for the puncture is mightier than the sword, and Max and I had only blades. But the Shqipetari butler or majordomo or whatever he was-flunky, I suppose, will do well enough-bowed low and cried, “Your Majesty!” in accented Hassocki.
The palace-my palace-was as perfect inside as out. Soft carpets lay on the floors. Some of the walls were plaster painted with scenes of the forest and the hunt. Some were tiled in floral patterns climbing gracefully to the ceiling. The beams up there were cedar; they would last forever, barring fire. The governor who’d built this place had simple tastes: nothing but the best.
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