Every Inch a King

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 palace-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.

“Here is the strongroom, your Majesty,” Essad Pasha said. It looked strong to me. It had more bars than a harbor district, more bolts than a linen mill, and more locks than all the salmon smokeries in Schlepsig. Essad Pasha produced a key ring and handed it to me. “The first opens the topmost lock.”

One after another, I undid them. One after another, Max opened the bolts and took down the bars. I pulled on the knob. The door silently swung open; the hinges gleamed with grease. Inside stood four stout chests. They were festooned with chains and more locks.

Without even looking at Essad Pasha, I held out my hand. Clank! He handed me another key ring, this one with even more angled and twisted brass on it than the other. He pointed to the chests to show in which order the keys opened the locks. I wasted no time testing them. They passed the test.

My heart pounding, I opened the first chest. It hadn’t moved when I shoved against it. I liked that. Silver is nice and heavy, gold even heavier. Up came the lid. “You see, Your Majesty?” Essad Pasha sounded smug.

I saw, all right. Piasters, leptas, thalers in silver and gold (the Dual Monarchy hasn’t minted gold thalers for a hundred years, but you find them everywhere in the Nekemte Peninsula), krams, dinars, livres also in silver and gold, shillings and florins, a fat silver shekel (with IN THE PROPHETS WE TRUST under the eagle), precious stones…I wanted to chortle like a miser over his fortune. I wanted to run my hands through the money for that sweet clinking-clanking sound. I wanted to jump in the chest and swim around.

Otto of Schlepsig would have, too, by Eliphalet’s strong right arm. Prince Halim Eddin, though-King Halim Eddin, I should say now-would have seen treasures of his own in Vyzance. Since I was supposed to be Halim Eddin, I couldn’t cackle like a laying hen, no matter how much I wanted to. I gave Essad Pasha what I hoped was a calm, serious nod. “I see, your Excellency,” I said…calmly, seriously.

“Examine the other chests, by all means,” Essad Pasha said. “You will see I have not cheated. North and south, east and west, treasure from the whole kingdom is here.”

Any time someone goes out of his way to tell you how honest he is, watch your wallet. I opened the other chests, one by one. Max stirred a couple of them to make sure the money and jewels weren’t hiding rocks or lumps of lead. They weren’t. I’d never seen so much-much-in one place before.

I glanced towards Essad Pasha. He was just a little tighter and tenser than he might have been. “This is very good, your Excellency,” I said. He relaxed, ever so slightly. If he hadn’t, I would have decided I was imagining things. But since he did, I casually asked, “And when do you plan to bring over the rest of it?”

He jerked. I might have stuck him in the rear with a pin. “How did you know?” he said hoarsely. “You showed me you were formidable, but how did you know?”

He wouldn’t have understood if I told him he reminded me of Dooger and Cark. Or if he did, that would have been worse. Dooger and Cark got as much pleasure from cheating a poor performer in their troupe (as if there were any other kind!) out of half a day’s pay as Essad Pasha did from hiding who could guess how much treasure. Essad Pasha got more money, though.

“Have I not lived in Vyzance?” I said, trying to sound indulgent and amused. “Have I not seen ministers? North and south, east and west, will ministers not try to line their own pockets when they can?” Then I wasn’t so amused any more. “This is all very well, as long as they realize the game has an end. We have come to the end, Essad Pasha. Bring the rest of the treasury here within the hour. If you hold out on me this time, your story will not have a happy ending.”

There was, I judged, at least an even-money (and money was indeed at the root of it) chance he could still order me killed and get away with it. Instead, he went to his knees and then to his belly, knocking his forehead on one of those elegant rugs. I’d intimidated him, all right. “Mercy, your Majesty!” he wailed with that wild tremolo only Hassocki can achieve. “Mercy! I meant no harm!”

Certainly not to yourself, I thought. “The sand flows through the glass, your Excellency,” I said. “I suggest you make haste.”

“Yes, your Majesty! Of course, your Majesty!” Essad Pasha was all but babbling.

I discovered I liked Yes, your Majesty! even better than Yes, your Highness! “Captain Yildirim!” I said.

“Yes, your Majesty?” Max said. Oh, I did like that!

“Please accompany his Excellency to the fortress and make sure everything goes smoothly when my soldiers bring the rest of the treasury back here,” I said. They were, in fact, Essad Pasha’s soldiers. But as long as I gave him no chance to remember that and do something about it, I was fine. (And, if the first King of Shqiperi came down with an acute case of loss of life not for being proved an impostor but for acting every inch a king, Essad Pasha would have a demon of a time finding anybody else to play the part. So I told myself, anyhow.)

Max saluted. A Hassocki drill sergeant would have screamed at him. Like any other critics, drill sergeants scream whether the performance rates screaming or not. Essad Pasha noticed nothing amiss, and he was the only audience that mattered. “Yes, your Majesty!” There! Max said it again!

Off they went. I turned to the Shqipetari flunky. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

“I am Skander, your Majesty,” he replied.

“Well, Skander, let’s get these chests locked up.” I handed him some of the keys as I continued, “We’ll leave the strongroom open till Captain Yildirim comes back with the rest of the treasure. Once it’s closed up again, I would like to meet the women of the harem.” Again, I didn’t want to sound as if I were drooling on the carpet. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin would have had plenty of women with whom to amuse himself. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin no doubt still did. Here in Peshkepiia, so did I.

Skander bowed. “Hearkening and obedience, your Majesty.” There was even a step up from Yes, your Majesty! Who would have imagined such a wonderful thing? Skander went on, “The chief eunuch says your ladies are also eager to meet you. Naturally, I have not presumed to enter the women’s quarters myself.”

“Naturally,” I agreed in what were probably abstracted tones. Halim Eddin would be used to eunuchs. His household doubtless had several. He wouldn’t have the urge to clutch at himself at the mere thought of the most unkindest cut of all. And, because I was he, I wouldn’t either. Or, if I did, I wouldn’t show it.

We waited. After a bit, Skander called to a lesser servant and spoke to him in Shqipetari. The underling nodded and hurried off. He came back with a tray with a large goblet and a small one. Skander took the small one, leaving the larger one for me. “Fruit juice, your Majesty,” he said. “Improved fruit juice.”

Did I need a food taster? In Vyzance, Halim Eddin probably did. As the Hassockian Atabeg’s nephew, he was lucky to have lived long enough to grow up. Here, I didn’t think I did. Murder in Shqiperi looked to be very straightforward. The sword, the knife, the crossbow quarrel-those were worries. Poison? No.

Skander politely waited for me to drink first. I raised the goblet. “Your good fortune, and Shqiperi’s,” I said, and sipped. I had all I could do not to cough. They’d, ah, improved that fruit juice with strong spirits till it had hair on its chest. I flicked out a drop with my little finger.

“Your Majesty is pious.” Skander imitated my gesture. He didn’t bat an eye when he drank.

“Have we got a court wizard?” I asked.

“How could we, your Majesty?” he said. “Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have a court.”

“We’ll have to do something about that,” I said. “How many wizards are there in Peshkepiia?”

“Always plenty of hedge-wizards,” Skander said. That was true. It was true everywhere. It was also useless: what one hedge-wizard could make, another could unmake. He went on, “Wizards of a quality to serve your Majesty? Perhaps four, perhaps half a dozen.”

That was perhaps two, perhaps four, more than I’d expected. Skander probably had lower standards than I did. Were his standards lower than Halim Eddin’s? There I wasn’t so sure. In the past hundred years, wizards from Schlepsig and Albion, from Narbonensis and Torino, and from Vespucciland across the sea have turned the world upside down and inside out. It’s not the same when we’re old as it was when we were young. Take Consolidated Crystal. In a lifetime, it’s spread everywhere. Now anyone can talk to anyone else. Whether he’ll have anything interesting to say is a different question, worse luck.

“Bring one of these wizards before me in the next few days,” I said. “If he suits me, I’ll use him. If not, we’ll try another.”

Skander bowed. “Of course, your Majesty.”

In about an hour, Max returned with sweating soldiers, with three more treasure chests, and with the keys to open them. When I did, I saw they really were full of money, with the odd bit of jewelry in there for variety’s sake. I could live with variety like that. “Is this the lot of it?” I asked.

“It’s everything Essad Pasha coughed up,” Max answered.

His eyebrows said he thought the local governor had more squirreled away somewhere. Mine said I thought Essad Pasha did, too. But what could I do about it? Short of turning him on a spit over a slow fire and rendering him down for lard-which might get me talked about even if he did yield several gallons-not much. I decided that could wait. Maybe I didn’t have all the treasure in Shqiperi. I had plenty for a thousand ordinary men, plenty even for a king.

Which meant…“The harem,” I said.

“The harem,” Skander agreed.

People who’ve never lived in kingdoms where they follow the Quadrate God have funny notions about harems. Painters-mostly Narbonese-use them as an excuse to paint pretty naked women. Far be it from me to deny that any excuse is a good one, but harem girls don’t lounge around naked all the time. For one thing, it gets cold. For another, the master of the harem mostly isn’t in. Do they show off for each other, then?

In the Hassockian Atabeg’s harem, maybe they do. He has more women than he knows what to do with. Well, no-he knows what to do with them, but with most of them he doesn’t do it very often. He has his favorites. The rest make do with one another, or with the eunuchs. Some eunuchs can keep a woman happy with what they have left, and she never needs to worry about having a baby. The ones who can’t do that have other ways.

But in most harems the women work when they’re not summoned to, ah, entertain. They spin. They sew. They weave. They raise children-and the only people who say that isn’t work are the ones who’ve never done it.

The door to the harem was barred from the outside. The king’s chosen women weren’t about to go off on their own. After I took down the bar and leaned it against the wall, I discovered the door was barred from the inside, too. Nobody was going to sneak in there and fool around, either. Well, I didn’t need to sneak. I knocked on the door: a loud, authoritative knock.

Max coughed. He does that every so often, whether he needs to or not. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it does. You have to know which is which, and how to translate. I had no trouble this time. If you think you’re going to be the only one in there having a good time, you’re out of your tree-that was what he was telling me.

I was tempted to think, Too bad for you, pal. Something told me that wasn’t a good idea. Most plots against kings start with their nearest and allegedly dearest. I couldn’t promise Max his share in Hassocki. Skander would have been scandalized. I couldn’t do it in Schlepsigian, either. Skander would have wondered why I switched languages, and I didn’t know he didn’t know mine. So I tipped Max a wink. That did the job.

The door opened. A eunuch bowed to me. A lot of eunuchs are fat; some are immense. This fellow was skinny enough to make up for three of them. He looked mean-and who could blame him? He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, his voice somewhere in that nameless range between tenor and contralto. “I am Rexhep, your Majesty.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, my good Rexhep,” I said. My good Rexhep’s eyes, black as the inside of a bear, said he wasn’t one bit pleased to make my acquaintance. “I have come to meet the women of my household.”

“Of course, your Majesty,” Rexhep said, while those glowing black eyes said something else altogether. I got the feeling Rexhep couldn’t do a woman any good with whatever equipment he had left. Was that why he looked mean? Lots of people are curious about such things. Me, some details I’d rather not know.

I walked through the door. The eunuch closed it after me. He barred it from his side, and I heard Skander bar it from the other. I knew that was the custom, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck anyhow. Was I King of Shqiperi or a prisoner?

As long as I acted like a king, I was one. If I’d learned anything coming from Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels in Thasos to the royal harem in Peshkepiia, that was it. When people think you believe it, they’ll believe it, too. If you want to tell me I’m wrong, think about Essad Pasha. He’d fought Vlachia and Belagora to a standstill, to say nothing of running a province full of Shqipetari for years. But he knocked his head on the ground to a down-at-the-heels Schlepsigian acrobat-because he thought I was a king.

Then there was Count Rappaport. The less said about him, the better. So I won’t.

Inside the harem, the air smelled of sandalwood and cinnamon and rosewater and spikenard and musk. Just breathing was enough to make your heart race. Poor Rexhep! Even if his heart did race, much good it did him. We turned a corner. There on couches set in a grassy courtyard waited the women Essad Pasha and his underlings had chosen for their king.

Before I set eyes on them, I thought they might be beauties who would dazzle me with their exotic loveliness. Then again, they were Shqipetari. The old joke goes, first prize is a week in Shqiperi; second prize is two weeks in Shqiperi. Maybe they wouldn’t be worth seeing at all.

Truth dwelt in the middle. Truth usually does. One end or the other, those are the places where madness lies. Think of the fools who conjured up a bolt of lightning to murder the last Poglavnik of Tver but one. They thought that would somehow set the peasants free. Or think of some of Count Rappaport’s colleagues, who figured the best way to keep the Dual Monarchy safe was by slaughtering all the Vlachs. From the Vlachs I’ve known, the sentiment has its points, but most of those people haven’t done anything to anybody. So…the middle.

I wouldn’t have minded a couple of dozen ravishing beauties. I wouldn’t even have minded ravishing them. But a couple of dozen hags? I could have done without that.

Some of these women were very pretty indeed. Some weren’t much above plain. I think any man who saw them would have said the same. Some other man might not agree which ones were pretty and which ordinary, though. No doubt about it, there was something here for every taste, or for everyone to taste, or-well, you get the idea.

All of them, pretty and plain alike, wore silk blouses and the baggy bloomers stage shows call harem trousers. In the stage shows, those are as transparent as the tailor can arrange and as the local laws allow. Here, they were of plain cotton-not a smooth thigh or a rounded rump on display. Such is life.

I stood among them and bowed in the four directions. “North and south, east and west, I greet you, my ladies,” I said. “I hope you all speak Hassocki?”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Their voices made a sweet chorus. I looked around to make sure they’d all answered. As far as I could tell, they had. Some of them had strong accents, but that was all right.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rexhep gesture. I don’t think I was supposed to. All the harem girls got down from their divans and prostrated themselves before me. They were a lot more graceful than Essad Pasha. Saying that doesn’t do them enough credit. A few days with a dancemaster and they could have earned their keep in any theater in Schlepsig or Narbonensis or Albion.

“Get up, get up,” I told them. “No need to stand on ceremony here, or even to fall down for it.”

Some of them smiled as they straightened. Others looked puzzled. I needed a moment to figure out why. When I did, it made me sad. You’ll always find people who want other people to shout at them and tell them what to do. That way, they don’t have to figure it out for themselves. I’d be lying if I said I understood this-I’ve been making my own way ever since I got old enough to ignore what my mother and father told me, which didn’t take long. I don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Some of the girls wanted a king who’d roar at them the way a mean taverner keeps his barmaids in line.

I wouldn’t have minded roaring at the minister from Belagora. As a matter of fact, I intended to-what else was Barisha for? But I have better things to do with pretty girls (or even with girls not much above plain) than roar at them.

“What are your names?” I asked them.

“Strati.” “Lutzi.” “Hoti.” They rained down on me. I was once in a troupe with a memorious man-Funes, his name was, from Leon. He taught me a few of his tricks: only a few, mind you. I don’t have a memory like his-Eliphalet’s whiskers, who does?-but I’m good with names.

Inside a few minutes, I had them all straight. Pick something about the person and associate it with the name and you won’t go wrong. Strati had straight hair. Lutzi stirred up lust in me-I think she was the prettiest of them. Hoti seemed hot; she dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief. And so on. It isn’t magic, not the kind that uses the laws of similarity and contagion, but it seems sorcerous to people who don’t know how it’s done. Funes was a master. With any kind of stage presence at all, he would have been rich and famous, not a sideshow performer. I don’t have a quarter of his skill, but I can sell what I do.

And the harem girls had to be the easiest audience I ever faced. If I’d roared at them, they would have thought they deserved it. Since I didn’t, they thought I was sweet. They’d never dreamt I would bother learning their names, let alone that I could do it so fast. They crooned and sighed and stared at me as if I’d fallen from heaven.

Sometimes-too often, most of the time-you can’t get one woman to fall in love with you. Here I had a couple of dozen all doing it at once. It would have been embarrassing if I hadn’t enjoyed it so much.

Every once in a while, I glanced over at poor Rexhep. Once, he caught me doing it. That was embarrassing. “May I speak with you a moment, your Majesty?” he asked in that strange, epicene voice.

“Of course,” I said, and then, to the harem girls, “I’ll be with you in a moment, my sweethearts.” I was sporting with them. Some of them, I think, realized as much. To others, the play was real. The Shqipetari sequester their women in Hassockian fashion-how not, when they learned it from the Hassocki? That only makes it easier for the girls to grow up naive and trusting.

Rexhep drew me far enough aside to keep the harem girls from overhearing-and don’t think they didn’t want to, the little snoops! “Are you a wizard, your Majesty?” the eunuch asked.

“Not a bit of it,” I answered. “I’ve only been a king for a couple of hours. Wizardry will have to wait. Why do you ask?” Maybe the girls weren’t the only naive ones; maybe he thought those tricks of memory were real magic, too.

That turned out to be close to the mark, but not on it. “Because you’ve ensorcelled your harem, that’s why,” he said. “Before you came in, half of them were angry at being plucked from their homes, and the other half were frightened. Now look at them! They want to have more to do with you.” He sounded as if that were the nastiest perversion he could think of. All things considered, it probably was.

“I don’t want them angry. I don’t want them frightened. I want them friendly. I’ll want them very friendly tonight,” I said. “So I try to make them like me. What’s so strange about that?”

He couldn’t see it. He thought it was a trick if it wasn’t magic. I wondered what sort of harem he’d kept before, and what kind of hellhole it was. By the look of sour bafflement on his face, he knew no more of affection than a blind man knows of sunsets. A pity, no doubt, but I couldn’t give him what he’d lost.

I went back to jollying the girls along. Rexhep went back to trying to figure out what I was up to. He wouldn’t believe what I told him, even when it was true. He needed complications, poor soul, whether they were real or not.

After a while, I turned to go. The girls sighed in disappointment. Rexhep looked relieved and suspicious at the same time-an expression only a eunuch’s face could manage. I told the girls, “Some of you will be summoned to my chamber tonight. If you aren’t summoned to my chamber tonight, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I’m only one man, and not quite so young as I wish I were.” Some of them giggled. Others had no idea what I was talking about. They really do raise them innocent in Shqiperi. I went on, “If I don’t summon you tonight, I will summon you another night, and one not long from now. I know you will all delight me, and I’ll try to please you, too. Meanwhile…”

Several girls tried to follow me out toward the doorway to the outer world. Only Rexhep’s scowls restrained them. Rexhep’s scowls, I think, could restrain anything up to and possibly including a dragon. As far as gloom goes, he gives Max a run for his money. Rexhep, of course, has the advantage-if that’s the word I want-of a real grievance against the world. No denying Max does well without it.

Rexhep unbarred the door on this side of the wall. Skander unbarred it on that side. I passed from one side to the other, from one world to another. Both the head eunuch and the palace majordomo made haste to separate those worlds again. As soon as the door closed, two bars thudded into place at the same time.

“Have you thought of a wizard for me?” I asked Skander. “I’d like to use his services this afternoon.”

“The very best in Peshkepiia, I believe, is a certain Zogu,” Skander said. “He dwells not far from the palace. If it would please you that he be summoned…”

“It would please me very much,” I said. I hoped it would, anyhow. Skander bowed and hurried away.

I went to the throne room. It was, to put things kindly, still a work in progress. That might have been gold foil pressed on the arms and legs and back of the Shqipetari royal seat. It might have been, but it looked more like the wrapping paper for nameday gifts you can buy in smart shops from the Dual Monarchy to Albion. Stranger things than a smart shop in Peshkepiia may have happened, but I can’t think of one lately.

Above the throne hung the royal emblem: a black two-headed eagle on a red background. It might have seemed more impressive if it hadn’t looked like a small rug woven for the even smaller tourist trade. A label was attached to the bottom corner of the royal emblem. PRODUCT OF ALBION, it read-so that really was a small rug woven for the tourist trade.

When I rested my arms on those of the throne, the shiny gold crackled and crunched. It was wrapping paper, then. I thought of the treasure in the strongroom. One of these days, Shqiperi would be a kingdom, I told myself, not just try to look like one.

Ah, well. We all make promises we can’t keep.

After about half an hour, Skander returned with another Shqipetar, presumably Zogu. The wizard had a sharp nose, a bristling mustache, and a pancake of hair on top of his head, the rest of his scalp being shaved. “Your Majesty,” he murmured, bowing toward the makeshift throne. “How may I serve you?”

“As you know my rank, you will know the privileges accompanying it,” I said. “You will also know the obligations accompanying it. And you will know that some of the privileges, if taken to extremes, become obligations. They can even become obligations a man is, ah, impotent to meet.”

I waited. Zogu looked clever. If he had not the wit to figure out what I was talking about, though, I wanted nothing to do with him. He didn’t disappoint me. Laying a finger by the side of his nose and winking, he said, “You want to screw your way through the harem like you were seventeen again.”

“Better than that, I hope-when I was seventeen, I was a clumsy puppy,” I said. Zogu laughed-reminiscently, I suppose, for who isn’t a clumsy puppy at seventeen? I went on, “I would like to be able to go as often now as I did then.”

“I can help you,” the wizard said. “The formulary will serve you well for a night, or two nights, or three, or maybe even four. Use it too long, though, and you will soon find you are a man of years not far removed from my own.” His chuckle had a wry edge. “Do I know this from experience? North and south, east and west, your Majesty, I do.”

“A few such nights should suffice,” I assured him. “By then, I shall have made my point.”

Zogu laughed merrily. “And I’m supposed to keep you pointing, eh? Well, just as you say, just as you say.”

Was he too clever for his own good? Men of that sort often are. “I rely on your magecraft,” I said, “but I also rely on your discretion. If your spell fails, I will do the best I can on my own. If your discretion fails, Zogu, north and south, east and west, the world is not wide enough to hide you from me. Do you understand what I tell you?”

“Oh, yes, your Majesty. Oh, yes. I have served…others who relied on my discretion. If I were to name them, they would have relied on it in vain,” he said.

“Good,” I said, for the answer pleased me. “Carry on, then-and I will carry on later.”

He chuckled again, and bowed. “May it be just as you say.”

At his feet sat a carpetbag. Had I met him in Schlepsig or the Dual Monarchy, I would have taken him for a commercial traveler with the worst haircut in the world. He began taking sundry stones and herbs and animal bits from the carpetbag. “You have everything you need?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Zogu answered easily. “When Skander summoned me, I thought on what you might require. I was not sure I knew-he gave me no time for a proper divination-but this possibility did cross my mind.”

“Get on with it, then,” I said.

He smiled and bowed and did. He was one of those wizards who like to explain things. I always let such people ramble on. You never can tell when you’ll hear something worth remembering. “This we call here the eagle’s stone, your Majesty,” he said. It was about the size and shape of an eagle’s egg, or half an egg sliced lengthwise. The inside was lined with glittering white crystals, but otherwise hollow. “Its property is the engendering of love betwixt man and woman.”

“Engendering is what I have in mind, all right,” I said.

Zogu put some seeds into the eagle’s stone and brayed them with a pestle. “These come from sweet basil,” he told me. I didn’t know who Basil was, but I wanted the girls to think me sweet. More seeds. I recognized these from their smell before Zogu said, “Anise.” It goes into Lokrian spirits, and they’ll rouse anything this side of the dead. The wizard added more bits of vegetable material. “Rocket,” he said. Since I wanted to up, up like a rocket, if not so fast, I nodded.

Next came some scraps of what looked like thin parchment. “What’s that?” I inquired.

“The shed skin of a long snake.” Zogu winked at me. I grinned back.

After that he put in some small blue pills and used the pestle to crush them to powder. “What are those?” I asked.

Zogu winked again and powdered another couple of pills. “My secret ingredient, you might say.”

“Well, well,” I said. Since he talked about so much of what he did, what he wouldn’t talk about must have been potent indeed.

“Set the eagle’s stone under your bed before you summon your lovelies,” Zogu told me after chanting over it in both Hassocki and Shqipetari. “You will rise to the occasion, and may you win a standing ovation.”

“My thanks,” I said. “And your fee for the services rendered?” When he named it, I didn’t scream, as I would have in my private capacity. How could I, when he was increasing my privates’ capacity? I just paid him. It’s good to be the king.