Every Inch a King

by Harry Turtledove

  “How much silver do we speak of?” Skander asked. Zogu told him. Shenkolle screeched, which had to mean Zogu knew what he was talking about. She sounded like a sawblade biting into a nail. Skander considered. “That much silver would settle a blood feud up in the mountains. It should be enough to atone for her crimes here. Settling is better than slaying-most of the time, anyway.”

  “All right, then.” I pointed to Shenkolle. “Those shekels-all of them-to your accusers today will buy your life-this once. If you come before me again, though, nothing will save you. Do you understand?” She nodded. “Do you swear you will pay the price today, then?” I asked.

  “North and south, east and west, I will pay it today.” She had no trouble with that oath. She seemed surprised. Zogu smiled to himself.

  I sent Shenkolle away. “If she doesn’t…” I said to Zogu.

  “Don’t worry, your Majesty,” the wizard said. “She will.” And she did.

  XVI

  Thethi, Dashmani, Shala, Ragova, Kiri, Toplana. Yes, my minister for special affairs and I stayed busy that third night. And either Zogu was an even better wizard than he claimed to be or we were even better men than we thought ourselves to be, for we had no trouble keeping up our end of the bargain, you might say.

  From certain encounters I have had since, I am inclined to give the wizardry at least some of the credit. Max will tell you he would have done as well if we’d never heard of Zogu. But then, Max will tell you any number of things. Some of them almost anyone can believe without seriously endangering himself. Others, however, should be heard only after consulting a physician, and are definitely unsafe for invalids and those in delicate health.

  At last, after our strenuous efforts to establish friendly relations with the locals were crowned with success, I sent the girls back to the harem. Once Skander and Rexhep led them down the hallway, I let Max out of the closet again.

  “You see?” I told him. “You can get away with anything, as long as you put up a bold enough front.”

  “We’re not dead yet, so you must be right,” he answered. “I wouldn’t have believed it. When the Atabeg said you weren’t who you said you were, I thought for sure they’d tear us to pieces.”

  I shrugged. “Essad Pasha doesn’t dare believe I’m not Halim Eddin. If he did, he would have to believe he was a fool. Nobody wants to do that.”

  “Even so, we’re not out of the woods,” Max said. “Some of Essad Pasha’s officers may decide he’s a fool, whether he thinks so or not. And if they do…” He made a horrid gurgling noise.

  “How can you sound so gloomy after what we’ve just been doing?” I asked.

  “I’d like to stay able to do it,” Max said. “You were the one who talked about losing bits and pieces of ourselves if things went wrong.”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” I assured him. “You’ll see in the morning. Why don’t you head back to your room and get some sleep? After tonight, after the last three nights, you ought to sleep like a baby-a tall baby, but a baby even so.”

  “I don’t want to sleep like a baby. Piddling in the bed and spitting up? Thanks, but I’d rather not.”

  I shoved him out the door. “Go on. You’re lucky I’m a kind and merciful king, or I’d give you what you deserve for that. Everything will be fine in the morning. You’ll find out.”

  But everything wasn’t fine in the morning. I found out. And I very nearly was found out. It happened like this.

  Trouble usually strikes at the most inconvenient times, when you’ve shaved half your face or just stepped out of the tub or told her that of course you weren’t married. Here, though, everything seemed fine. I’d drunk my coffee. I’d eaten my fried mush. I thought I was ready to park my fundament on the throne again and act royal. I even thought I was getting pretty good at it.

  Skander came up to me and bowed. “Excuse me, your Majesty, but Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa are here to see you.”

  “Are they?” I said innocently. I don’t know if I’d convinced Max everything was fine. Max is not easy to convince of such things. I do know I’d convinced myself. “Well, I’d be glad to see them.”

  There I sat, on the throne, happy and kingly, Max standing a step back and to the left, where he belonged. There they came, two of Essad Pasha’s officers in dust-brown uniforms. Neither of them had missed a meal any time lately. Major Mustafa had a big black mustache. Colonel Kemal had an even bigger gray one. Major Mustafa’s fez and shoulder straps had one jewel. Colonel Kemal’s had three.

  They didn’t bow. They didn’t say, “Your Majesty.” They just looked at me, not quite as if they’d found half of me in their apple but as if they’d like to give me to a Shqipetari cook for some intimate acquaintance with hot grease.

  I did my best not to notice. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to notice. I said, “Gentlemen, it’s good that you’re here”-which only shows how much I knew. “Tell me your specialties. I’ll want to get the best use out of you when the fighting with Belagora heats up.”

  They just kept staring at me. After a little while, I started not to like that very much. At last, Major Mustafa said, “How can you be who you say you are when the Atabeg says you aren’t who you say you are?”

  I waited for Max to cough. He didn’t bother. He evidently figured I could see this was trouble all by myself. Max is so trusting. “You must not have heard. I explained that to Essad Pasha just yesterday,” I told the officers, and went through my song and dance again. Really, I should have had an orchestra accompanying me. I finished, “So you see, all this silly fuss should die down in a few days,” and waited for the applause from my adoring audience.

  Only it wasn’t adoring. If the major and the colonel were carrying rotten rutabagas, they would have thrown them. Since they didn’t, they contented themselves with shaking their heads. They were out of synch with each other, which struck me as most unmilitary. Major Mustafa said, “We did hear that yesterday.”

  “We don’t believe it,” Colonel Kemal said.

  “The Hassockian Atabeg would never sully himself by telling a lie,” Mustafa declared.

  I almost had a laughing fit, right there on the throne. There hasn’t been a Hassockian Atabeg for the past five hundred years who wasn’t a lying reptile. It’s essential for living long enough to get halfway good at the job. And I couldn’t tell them so. If I did, they would decide I was insulting their sovereign, and I couldn’t possibly be the lying reptile’s nephew.

  I was, plainly, going to have to be a lying reptile myself. Well, if working for Dooger and Cark prepared me for anything, it prepared me for that. I rose from the throne, a smile still on my face. “Gentlemen, I have to tell you you are mistaken,” I said. Or at least right for the wrong reasons. “Let’s talk about it, shall we? Captain Yildirim, why don’t you come along with us?”

  “Yes, your Majesty.” Max had to be wondering if I wanted him to murder the two Hassocki. I don’t blame him; I was wondering the same thing myself.

  We ambled through the palace. I went on explaining how I really was Halim Eddin and always had been, even as a small child, although the lying reptile in Vyzance (whom I couldn’t call a lying reptile) couldn’t admit it. Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa went on not believing me. I started to get angry, though I didn’t let it show. Anyone would have thought from their attitude that I was deliberately lying to them!

  In due course, we reached the front entrance. The soldiers standing guard there sprang to stiff attention. Whoever was in charge of them seemed imperfectly trustful of my popularity; he’d posted a couple of squads’ worth of men there to protect me from my beloved people. “At ease,” I told them.

  “Yes, your Majesty,” they chorused, and relaxed from their brace.

  They thought I was King of Shqiperi. And if they did…“Men,” I said, “arrest these officers! They plot to remove me from the throne!”

  It was as easy as that. The soldiers seized Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa. After a moment’s shocked pa
ralysis, the officers raised a horrible fuss. It did them exactly no good. A king outtrumped a major and a colonel put together. “What shall we do with ’em, your Majesty?” a sergeant asked once the loyal dimwits, uh, soldiers had laid hold of Kemal and Mustafa.

  “Take them to the dungeons,” I said grandly. Kemal and Mustafa cursed and moaned even louder than they had before. I paid no attention to them. To my vast relief, neither did the palace guards.

  “Uh, your Majesty, where are the dungeons?” the sergeant asked: a reasonable question, under the circumstances.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “They’re in there somewhere, I suppose-how can you have a palace if you don’t have dungeons?-but I just got here myself. I haven’t found ’em yet.” I went back to the doorway and shouted down the hall: “Skander!”

  “Yes, your Majesty?” I don’t know how he kept appearing out of nowhere like that, but he did. Maybe Zogu had something to do with it.

  “We have a couple of gentlemen here who require incarceration,” I said. Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa vehemently denied it. Skander didn’t listen to them, either. “Noisy, aren’t they?” I remarked. “Would you be so kind as to show the soldiers to the dungeons so they can lock these rascals up? I hope the doors are thick-that way, their racket won’t bother anyone else.”

  “The doors are very thick indeed, your Majesty,” Skander said. He nodded to the sergeant. “Come this way, if you please.” Mustafa and Kemal did their best not to go that way. Their best wasn’t good enough. I don’t believe the soldiers did anything in persuading them that wouldn’t heal in a few days.

  All the palace guards trooped along with the loud, boisterous officers. The more Kemal and Mustafa tried to fight, the more men joined in to make sure they couldn’t. Max and I stood by ourselves at the entrance. “Well,” I said brightly, “that was interesting.”

  “There’s one word,” Max said. He used several others, most of which would set the page on fire if I tried to write them down.

  “Did I get out of it or not?” I asked him. “Did I get away with it or not?”

  He didn’t want to say I had, but he couldn’t very well say I hadn’t. “You’ve got the balls of a burglar,” was what he did say, “and if you don’t watch out, you’ll get ’em chopped off just like Rexhep.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” I said, and hoped like anything it was.

  When the guardsmen came back, it was without Colonel Kemal and Major Mustafa. The sergeant didn’t look happy. “Whoever designed those dungeons didn’t know what he was doing. No dripping water, no bad smells…I didn’t see a single rat. North and south, east and west, there are hardly any cockroaches, even.”

  “They’ll have to do for now,” I said. “Later on, maybe, we’ll fix up something properly nasty.”

  “I should hope so!” he said. “Back in Vyzance, now, you’ll be used to doing it right. Filth, vermin, water, gloom, easy access for the torturers…They don’t fool around back there.” If I ever did decide to renovate my dungeons, here was a man with ideas.

  I had an idea of my own. It turned out not to be a good idea, but I couldn’t know that when I had it. “Come with me,” I said to Max. “The people of Peshkepiia should get to know us. Let’s go to the market square and see them at their earnest endeavors.” Yes, Let’s watch the quaint natives was what it boiled down to. I should have known better, even then. Shqipetari are too confounded ornery to be quaint.

  Not that a Shqipetar gave me trouble. Oh, no. But I’m getting to that.

  If a Schlepsigian public-health mage got a look at the market square in Peshkepiia, he would close it down on the spot, fall over dead from a fit of apoplexy, or more likely both. Flies buzzed everywhere. They settled on meat and vegetables and stallkeepers and customers. Sewage ran in the gutters and puddled here and there, which helped account for the flies. Consumptive beggars held out bowls and coughed on passersby.

  Another difference between civilization and Shqiperi that I’ve already noted is, people were haggling wherever you looked. When I went on the road, I needed a while to understand this. In Schlepsig, there is a price. That is the price. The seller tells you what it is. You pay, or you don’t. This is the natural way, the sensible way, to do business.

  It’s not the way they do business in the Nekemte Peninsula. There is no deal in those parts without a dicker. The seller would be offended if you took his first offer. He would think you despised him, or he would think he set his price much too low. Since no one ever takes a first offer, his honor and his sense of his own cleverness meet no danger.

  In Shqiperi, where every man usually carries as many weapons as he can afford and as many as he can wear and still walk, dickering takes on a whole new dimension. A bargainer will think nothing of drawing a dagger or swinging a sword or letting the flat of an axe blade crash down on a tabletop. Shqipetari treat a haggle like the prelude to a blood feud. Every now and then, it is.

  So when Max and I saw-and heard-a knot of shouting, gesticulating people in the market square, we didn’t think much of it, not at first. Shqipetari shout and gesticulate as naturally as Schlepsigians take orders. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything; it’s just part of who they are. It doesn’t necessarily not mean anything, either, though, as I was about to discover.

  In fact, Max, being so uncouthly tall, discovered it before I did. He could peer over the crowd and discover why it was a crowd. I had to peer through people, which is harder; they refuse to go transparent when you most want them to.

  “Uh, your Majesty, we have a problem here,” he said.

  “What kind of problem?” I asked. The Shqipetari not only stubbornly stayed opaque but got more excited by the minute. And they said it couldn’t be done!

  “You know the emblem of this kingdom?” Now Max, Eliphalet bless his pointed little head, was being opaque, too.

  I thought of the bicephalous eagle (made in Albion) tacked up behind my makeshift throne. “Personally, no,” I answered, but I was wrong.

  Max proceeded to point this out: “If that emblem were a man, he’d be in the middle of that crowd right now.”

  A horrid suspicion ran through me. “Tell me anything you please, O most excellent Minister for Special Affairs, anything at all. But north and south, east and west”-even in my extremity, I did remember not to swear by the Two Prophets-“tell me that’s not Josй-Diego in there.”

  But it was, or they were, depending on how you look at things. Dooger and Cark’s flyers went right on showing a two-headed man, even though we didn’t have one in the company any more. Josй-Diego was the one we didn’t have any more. The reason we didn’t have him-them?-any more was that the two heads couldn’t get along with each other, not even a little bit, which meant he, or they, didn’t have an act.

  I finally got my own glimpse of him, them, whatever. He, they, whatever, hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I saw him/them. Josй, the right-hand head, wore a full beard. Because he did, Diego was clean-shaven. Diego, the left-hand head, let his curly brown hair fall almost to his shoulders-I mean, shoulder. Because he did, Josй shaved his scalp. Just to make matters worse, Josй controlled their left arm and leg, Diego their right, and not the other way around. Sometimes they-he?-couldn’t even walk, because the right leg didn’t know what the left leg was doing.

  It gets worse. Josй was a reactionary. Diego was a radical. Josй ate meat-adored it. Diego was a vegetarian. Josй liked girls. Diego liked boys. Whether they ever managed to make like lucky Pierre, I’m afraid-or rather, glad-I can’t tell you.

  And it gets even worse than that, because Josй-Diego saw me, too. Actually, I suspect Josй-Diego saw Max first. Max is almost as noticeable as Josй-Diego, and under some circumstances even more so. And after the two-headed man spotted Max, he didn’t need long to spot me with him. He waved to us and headed our way.

  That was about as bad as it could get. He knew we were Otto of Schlepsig and Max of Witte. He didn’t know we were supposed to be King Halim Eddin and
his more or less faithful aide-de-camp, Captain Yildirim. He knew we followed the Two Prophets. Josй followed them, too, with the fanatical devotion of most Leonese. Diego was a freethinker. Neither of them knew we were affecting to reverence the Quadrate God. Even if for different reasons, they both would have been appalled.

  Giving Josй and Diego something to agree about was not what I had in mind.

  “What are you fellowth doing in thith Prophetth-forthaken plathe?” Diego asked. Yeth, uh, yes, he talked like that. No, he wasn’t being effeminate. Josй spoke Schlepsigian with the same lisping Leonese accent. Josй was a lot of things, starting with bad-tempered fool and rapidly going downhill from there, but no one would ever accuse him of effeminacy.

  Max did his best to tip Josй-Diego off to what we were doing. Drawing himself up to his full height-which takes a lot of drawing-he spoke in severe tones: “Have a care how you address Halim Eddin, King of Shqiperi.”

  That got both heads’ attention, but not in the way we wanted. “Whose leg are you pulling, Max?” Josй asked. I’m not going to write the lisp any more. I’m just not. But it was there. You can hear it in your mind’s eye, if you want to, or see it in your ear.

  “Otto’s no more a king than I am,” Diego added.

  “You’re no king. You’re a cursed queen,” Josй said. I told you they didn’t get along.

  They switched from Schlepsigian to Leonese about then. I don’t really speak Leonese, but I do speak Narbonese and Torinan, which are its cousins, so I can follow it after a fashion. Diego said something rude about Josй’s mother, which is strange, since she was Diego’s mother, too. Josй said something very rude about the only kind of meat Diego ate. Diego screeched and tried to hit him. Josй blocked the punch.