Every Inch a King

II

Oh, the resemblance wasn’t exact. Halim Eddin waxed his mustachios into points, where I let mine stay bushy. He plucked his eyebrows, the way Hassocki nobles do. I’d never let tweezers get near mine in my life. My hairline receded a little more than his. When I went up for a closer look, I saw that his eyes were bright blue, where mine are gray.

But we were about the same age. We both had brown hair. We both had long faces with strong chins and formidable noses. We both had high, proud cheekbones and wide mouths. We certainly could have been brothers. We might well have been twins. They say every man has his double. I never expected to meet mine staring at me off a journal page with a pound and a half of Hassocki medals on his chest.

Everybody in Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels hurried up to gape at the picture-and at me. Now I know how the freaks and demons in the sideshow feel. Everybody started talking at once, using several different languages. Ilona-by then she’d come out of her wagon-looked at me sidelong and said, “There were things you weren’t telling me, darling.”

“There were things I wasn’t telling me, darling,” I answered.

Max bowed deeply. He looks like a carpenter’s rule with big ears when he does that. “What is your command, your Highness?” he asked, sounding more like an undertaker than a courtier.

“Why don’t you go soak your head?” I told him.

He bowed again. “With pleasure, your Highness.” He grabbed another bottle-it was genever this time, I think-and got a long start on soaking, anyway.

All the rest of the night, the troupe called me your Highness and your Majesty. They wouldn’t let it alone, even after the joke got stale. For a while, it annoyed me and made me angry. Then I started to accept it as nothing less than my due. That put some new life in the joke-except by that time I wasn’t joking any more.

No, I’m not ashamed to admit it. That was how the idea caught fire in me: there at a drunken party for third-rate circus performers in a second-rate town that had just changed hands between a senile empire and a kingdom that wanted to revive an empire not just senile but centuries dead. Strokes of genius are where you find them.

I’ve acted on the stage, as I say. I’ve won applause in cities far grander than Thasos ever dreamt of being. Why I wasn’t still doing that then…is a long story, and not altogether my fault. You can ask anyone who was there when things went sour. You’ll hear the same thing-or perhaps you won’t. Some people are nothing but natural-born liars.

But never mind that now. A role onstage is one thing. A role on the stage of the world, on the stage of history-that’s something else again. The role of a lifetime! Liable not to be a very long lifetime if something went wrong, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. If only I could bring it off, I’d drink out on it for the rest of my days.

If. I couldn’t do anything about it that evening. I couldn’t do anything about anything, not as drunk as I got. An acrobat with a hangover is the most pitiful thing the Two Prophets ever saw, the only problem being that no one will pity him. Try doing flips and spinning through the air high above the ground when your head wants to fall off. Try not losing your lunch on the audience-it will get you talked about if you do. Try…Never mind. Try drawing your own unpleasant pictures.

Yes, I knew it was going to happen if I drank much more. And I drank much more anyhow. It was my own fault. I knew that, too. Come the next morning, knowing didn’t help.

I staggered out of my wagon wishing I were dead. My mouth tasted the way the gutters in Thasos smell. A demon drummer twenty feet tall pounded the top of my head every time my heart beat. If I opened my eyes too wide, I was sure I would bleed to death through them. It might have been a relief.

Right at that moment, I probably didn’t look much like Prince Halim Eddin. As I say, followers of the Quadrate God don’t drink, or at least they’re not supposed to. There are exceptions-oh, indeed there are-but I couldn’t have told you if the prince was one of them.

Thinking of him, though, helped steady me on my feet. I ate some raw cabbage: the Lokrian hangover cure. I ate some tripe soup: the Hassocki hangover cure. I had the hair of the dog that bit me: my personal hangover cure. Put them all together and I was at least within screaming distance of my old self-if a bit on the flatulent side-by the time Max emerged.

He looked as bad as I’d felt a little earlier. He had his head in his hands, as if afraid he’d lose it. He didn’t just have the hair of the dog. He had the tail and the ears and one of the hind legs, and a little tripe soup to go with it.

Everybody has to find his own cure for the morning after. Max of Witte’s worked for him, and faster than mine worked for me. One of the things that proved is, his liver is made of sterner stuff than mine. He gave me a sepulchral smile-almost the only kind he owns-and said, “And how are you this morning, your Majesty?” He was joking, the way everybody had been the night before.

I took a deep breath. “Max,” I said, “how would you like to be the aide-de-camp to the new King of Shqiperi?”

He looked at me as if he thought I’d gone smack out of my mind. “I think you’ve gone smack out of your mind,” he said.

“Why?” I grabbed the copy of the Thasos Chronicle Ludovic had brought in. I opened it to the story about how the Shqipetari were looking for a new king. Sure as sure, that was-or might as well have been-my face looking out from the page. I tapped it with my forefinger. Then I tapped the end of my own nose. “They’re looking for Prince Halim Eddin, the Hassockian Atabeg’s nephew. And, by the Two Prophets, we’ll give them Halim Eddin!” I tapped my nose again.

Actually, the Two Prophets had very little to do with becoming King of Shqiperi, except in the negative sense. Like the Hassocki, most Shqipetari follow the Quadrate God. That was why they were interested in Halim Eddin and not one of the nine million unemployed princelings from Schlepsig or Narbonensis or Torino. I didn’t think the other kingdoms in the Nekemte Peninsula would be particularly thrilled at that. Like the Lokrians, Vlachia and Belagora and Plovdiv and Dacia all reverence the Two Prophets, even if they are Zibeonite heretics.

Max looked from me to the journal and back again. “All right, you look the part,” he admitted. “But how much Hassocki do you speak?”

“Enough to assure thee that thou art the bastard child of a poxed camel-driver and an innocent sheep he deceived and debauched,” I answered in that tongue. One hitch in the Hassocki Army was enough to make me fluently obscene. By the time I finished the second term, I was just plain fluent. Languages have always come easy for me-easier than steady work.

His eyebrows leaped. “That’s pretty good-thou shriveled and flyblown horse turd.” Max knew some Hassocki, too. I thought I’d remembered that. It would help.

“Are you game?” I pushed him. “If you turn yellow on me now, you’ll never forgive yourself, and you know it. If we pull this off, people will still be talking about it a hundred years from now.”

“And if we don’t, the Shqipetari will murder us. Or maybe the Hassockian soldiers still in their country will beat them to the punch.” Max was not an optimist. But then, as I’ve found since, nobody who’s ever had much to do with the Land of the Eagle is an optimist. Taken all in all, the Nekemte Peninsula is a backwater. Well, Shqiperi is a backwater even by the standards of the Nekemte Peninsula. It’s mountainous. It’s isolated. The Hassocki garrison there was long since cut off from any hope of relief or rescue. The national sport, as far as anyone can tell, is the blood feud.

But I could be a king!

I looked down my nose, so much like Prince Halim Eddin’s nose, at Max. Well, actually, I looked up it at him, since he’s about six feet eight. In my toploftiest tones, I said, “I don’t think you’ve got the nerve.”

If he’d had only the hair of the dog, he probably would have laughed and told me I was right. With a good deal more than that aboard, though, his pinched, sallow cheeks turned red. “Who hasn’t?” he growled. “I’ll go anywhere you go, Otto, and you know it cursed well.”

And I did. We’d been some strange places together, Max and I, and who was watching whose back wasn’t always obvious. “All right,” I said, roaring as gently as any sucking dove. “All right. The first place we need to go is a public crystal.”

“Why?” Max asked. “So we can tell the world we’re sticking our head in the dragon’s mouth?” He opened his mouth very wide and bit down. The effect would have been more dramatic if he didn’t have a missing front tooth. It somehow impaired his ferocity.

“No, no, no,” I said. “What are the Shqipetari and Essad Pasha going to need before they think Halim Eddin is on his way?” Essad Pasha was the Hassocki general in command of the garrison there. Before the war, he’d been the Hassocki governor of Shqiperi. He had fingers in so many pies, he probably had about four hands.

Max looked at me. “I was going to say a hunting license, but I don’t suppose they bother with them there.”

“Funny man! You should do vaudeville and music-hall turns instead of this,” I said. “What they’ll need is a crystal message from Vyzance saying he’s on his way.”

“And how do you propose to get them to send one, thou great lion of the perfumиd bedchamber, thou running rabbit on the blood-filled field?” Max dropped into Hassocki again. It’s a good language for being…charming in.

I just grinned. I hadn’t served those two hitches in the Hassocki army for nothing-though with what the Hassocki pay, it often seemed that way at the time. “It so happens that I’m friends with a certain Murad Bey. He was a lieutenant when I was a sergeant. These days, he’s a major in the Hassockian Ministry of War.”

“And he’d send a message like that?” Max shook his head. He does dubious very well. “Wouldn’t he sooner send one ordering us arrested and handed over to the torturers?”

“I know this man, I tell you. It’s possible he’ll say no, if he thinks the Empire’s honor is touched,” I said. “But if he says he’ll send the message I need, he’ll send it. He likes practical jokes. Did I ever tell you about the time when he had three different officers thinking they’d got the colonel’s courtesan pregnant?”

“The joke’ll be on us if the torturers are waiting,” Max pointed out.

“But it’ll be a bigger joke if it’s on Essad Pasha and the Shqipetari,” I said. “Torturing foreigners is easy. It happens all the time. Making one of your own generals look like a fool, though…”

Max didn’t answer right away. Instead, he went to work on the dog’s other hind leg. After he set down the jug, he got to his feet. “This had better work,” he said. “If it doesn’t, I’ll never forgive you.”

If it didn’t, he’d probably be too dead to forgive me. Of course, I’d probably be too dead to need forgiving. I stood up, too. “Let’s get moving,” I said.

Lokrian soldiers swaggered through the streets of Thasos. They were little dark men in green uniforms. They had kepis and neatly trimmed mustaches. There were also soldiers from Plovdiv, off to the northwest, in the streets. They were bigger and fairer, and wore tobacco-brown uniforms. They had floppy hats and big, bushy mustaches.

They didn’t look as if they much cared for Lokrians. The Lokrians didn’t look as if they much cared for them, either. Lokris and Plovdiv had been allies against the Hassocki. Of course, everybody in the Nekemte Peninsula-except the Shqipetari, mind you-had been allies against the Hassocki. Now, here in Thasos, you could watch the thieves fall out.

That round of fighting didn’t start till later, though, so I’m not going to talk about it now. If you talk about all the wars, you’ll never get around to anything else.

Both the soldiers from Lokris and the soldiers from Plovdiv looked as if they didn’t much care for Max and me. I did my best not to notice, or not to be noticed noticing. Blithe ignorance tends to fray, though, when somebody aims a crossbow at your brisket. After a moment, when Max and I just kept walking, the Lokrian lowered the cursed thing and grinned as if he’d been joking. Maybe he had. But not even Dooger and Cark would hire a clown with a sense of humor like that.

“Nice fellow,” I remarked in Schlepsigian. If the Lokrian soldier spoke my language-not likely but not impossible-he couldn’t have proved by my tone that I was being sarcastic.

“Sure is,” Max said, just as heartily. Neither one of us is usually such a good liar so early in the morning.

The Dual Monarchy has a post office in Thasos. Narbonensis has one. So does Albion. So does Schlepsig. And so did the Hassocki. It was their city, after all. Now that’s a Lokrian post office. The Green Dragon flies above it, not the red lightning bolt on gold.

Right next to what’s now the Lokrian post office is the local Consolidated Crystal headquarters. Consolidated Crystal doesn’t belong to any one kingdom. They say their services belong to people from all the kingdoms-people with the money to pay for them, of course. Actually, in a lot of ways they’re above all the kingdoms. Because what they do is so important, any kingdom that tried to interfere with them would end up in trouble with all its neighbors. Nobody talks about that, but everybody knows it.

We went in. Max held the door open for me. “Your Majesty,” he murmured-and then let go of the door so it swung shut and got me in the seat of the pants.

“Some aide-de-camp you turned out to be,” I said. “I should have asked Ilona.”

“There’s a difference between aide-de-camp and camp follower,” Max said loftily. He was lucky Ilona wasn’t there to hear that. She would have followed him, all right-with a knife.

Inside the CC headquarters, you never would have known that Thasos had changed hands not long before, or that fighting still sputtered not far away. Everything was peaceful and orderly. People-Lokrians, Hassocki, an Albionese merchant in baggy tweeds, us-waited in line for the next available crystallographer. Lots of places in Thasos, lines just sit there. They don’t move. Not at CC headquarters. Perish the thought. Those people know what efficiency means.

We got to the front of the line pretty quick. “Good morning, gentlemen,” the clerk said in fluent Schlepsigian. I’d already heard him use Lokrian and Hassocki. A man of parts, plainly, and smart parts at that. I look like Halim Eddin-and I had the picture to prove it!-while Max could be anything under the sun except handsome. But this clever young fellow pegged us.

The crystallographer he sent us to also spoke Schlepsigian, though with a Hassocki accent. “To whom do you wish to send your message, gentlemen?” he asked.

“To Major Murad Bey, at the Ministry of War in Vyzance,” I answered.

He blinked. “I hope the Lokrians’ sorcerers will pass it,” he said. “Lokris and the Hassockian Empire are still at war, you know.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” I said. He was a swarthy man, but his cheeks went pink anyhow. I went on, “I suppose they’ll use the intent test. They’re welcome to, for I mean no harm to Lokris.”

“Ah. Good. Excellent, in fact.” He blinked again. “You know something of this business.”

“A little something, maybe-no more.” I knew a good deal more, but that wasn’t the crystallographer’s affair. It’s a long story. In fact, I wasn’t even there when they thought I was. If I was there, I didn’t do it. If I did do it, I didn’t mean it. And if I did mean it, the bastard had it coming. But I digress. Back to it: “Here is the message.” I gave it to him, finishing, “Please acknowledge at CC office Thasos.”

“I’ll send it. They will vet it,” the crystallographer warned. I shrugged. He bent low over the crystal on his desk. In places like Albion and Narbonensis, crystallographers wear turbans to look mystical. In Thasos, ordinary people wear turbans. The crystallographer probably wore one himself when he went off duty. Here, he had on a homburg to look modern.

He murmured the necessary charms, and the eight-digit number that made sure he reached a particular crystal in Vyzance and not one in, say, Lutetia. Nobody in the capital of Narbonensis needed to know anything about this. No, not yet.

Light flared in the heart of the transparent crystal sphere. As it faded, I saw the tiny image of another crystallographer. He too had a homburg on his head. Vyzance, sure enough.

Our crystallographer recited the message. The other crystallographer read it back. His voice sounded as if it came from very far away. As a matter of fact, it did come from very far away, even if the crystal sat right there in front of it. When the men on both sides of the connection agreed they had the message straight, they broke the arcane link. The crystal on the crystallographer’s desk went back to being a bocci ball for ghosts.

“You told the truth-I had no interference from the Lokrians,” our crystallographer said. “If there is a reply to this…communication, it will be delivered to you at the carnival.”

“Circus!” I said indignantly. Eliphalet help me-Zibeon, too-there is another step down from Dooger and Cark’s. I’ve played in carnivals. I hope I never have to do it again. It’s not honest work, and that’s the best I can say for it.

The crystallographer would have had to cheer up to seem unimpressed. “Go in peace,” he murmured. “North and south, east and west, go in peace.” Yes, he followed the Quadrate God.

“North and south, east and west, peace to you as well,” I said in Hassocki. His big, dark eyes widened. He didn’t hear that every day from an obvious follower of the Two Prophets.

Max and I had to stand in another line to settle the tab for the message. Anywhere in Thasos but here, we could have dickered to our hearts’ content. We could have drawn up chairs, ordered some thick, sweet Hassocki-style coffee, taken a few puffs from the mouthpiece of a water pipe, and told the clerk what a thief he was. Lokrians are as mad for haggling as Hassocki. But not at Consolidated Crystal. One price per word, all over the civilized world and in as many of the barbarous parts as they reach. They don’t even charge extra in Tver, and if that doesn’t prove my point, nothing ever would.

“Now what?” Max asked as we left the CC offices. “We wait to find out whether this Murad Bey is as daft as you are?”

I wouldn’t have put it precisely like that. Since Max had, though, I swept off my hat and gave him my grandest bow. “What else?” I said.

“We could make our funeral arrangements now,” he suggested. “We’ll probably be too busy dying to do it later.” Before I could find something suitably devastating to say to that, he shook his head. “No-wouldn’t help. No undertaker here is going to have a branch office in Shqiperi.”

“Think on the bright side, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “You’re going to be aide-de-camp to a king. You’ll help make decisions of state. And you’ll brag about it afterwards as long as you live.”

“Twenty minutes’ worth of bragging. Oh, joy.” Max is a good fellow in a great many ways, but he’s convinced every silver lining has a cloud.

We stopped on the way back to the circus and bought sausages skewered on sticks and then dipped in maize batter and fried: a local delicacy indigestible enough to satisfy the most ambitious dyspeptic. The sausage-seller was a Lokrian-probably not named Kleon, worse luck. He tried to charge us some outrageous price because we were foreigners. I couldn’t tell him what I thought of him in his own language, but figured he was likely to understand Hassocki: “Thou dog and son of a dog, thou wouldst steal the silver set on the eyes of thy mother’s corpse.”

“May the fleas of a thousand camels afflict thy scrotum,” he returned amiably. We haggled in Hassocki, though some of the gestures we used had nothing to do with numbers. I finally argued him down to something approaching reason.

Max bit into his sausage. The batter crunched. Grease ran down his chin. He nodded approval. “Not bad. They’d go good with a seidel or two of beer.”

Now, what passes for beer in Thasos is a far cry from what we brew in Schlepsig. Much of it, indeed, tastes as if it has passed-through the kidneys of a diabetic donkey. Still, as they say, any beer is better than none, and the food had plenty of flavor to make up for what the drink lacked. We found a beer cellar. We found its product…adequate.

Having swallowed the last bite of sausage, Max swallowed the stick, too-after his sword, it hardly made an hors d’oeuvre. The tapman’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. I hoped-and so, no doubt, did Max-he’d be astonished enough to give us our next seidel free. He wasn’t. He didn’t. Bit by bit, naпvetй leaks out of the world.

I was looking forward to Shqiperi. I was sure naпvetй lingered there. It must have, or the Shqipetari wouldn’t have believed a king would solve their problems. Or maybe Essad Pasha, being a Hassocki general, thought a king of his own blood would solve his problems.

When we got back to the circus tent, we started practicing for the evening show. Max had no trouble. I discovered doing trapeze flips with one of those sausages in my stomach was every bit as enjoyable as if I’d swallowed a thirty-pound catapult stone instead. If I had a weak stomach, I never would have turned acrobat in the first place, but I don’t think I ever put it to a sterner test.

I was upside down in midair when I spotted the messenger boy in the blue CC uniform. “Are you looking for Otto of Schlepsig?” I called in Hassocki as soon as I was right side up again.

“That’s right, sir. Are you he?” The kid spoke with a Lokrian accent, but we could understand each other.

“I am no one else but the king of acrobats, Otto himself.” Hard to strike a pose while hanging from a trapeze, but I managed. If a man will not blow a blast from his own horn, it shall remain unblown forever.

I cut the rehearsal short to see what Murad Bey had to say. No one else was likely to send me a crystal message, not unless some of my stubborner creditors had finally found out what show I was playing in. I gave the messenger boy a couple of coppers and sent him on his way.

My thumbnail cracked the wax seal on the message. I unrolled the paper and read the transcription. It was from Murad Bey. That which you asked me to accomplish, my brother, it is accomplished, he wrote. Go, then, and may good fortune attend you.

“Ha!” I said, and, “Ha!” again. I turned a couple of backflips. Suddenly the sausage seemed to weigh nothing at all. I carried the message over to Max. “Here! Take a look at this!”

He made a gurgling noise. He had some considerable length of steel down his throat. In due course, it came out again. He wiped off the blade-swallowing a rusty sword is probably not something he wanted to do. Then he took the message and scowled at it. “What’s it say?” he asked. “I speak some Hassocki, but I don’t read it.”

“Some aide-de-camp you’ll make,” I muttered, and translated what Murad Bey had said. Right about now, another messenger boy in a blue Consolidated Crystal uniform would be delivering not one but two messages to Essad Pasha in Shqiperi. One of them would purport to come from the Hassockian Atabeg himself, and would say, Prince Halim Eddin is coming. He has supreme command over all troops present in Shqiperi. The other would pretend to come from the high command of the Hassocki Army in Vyzance, and would say, Prince Halim Eddin is coming. Immediately turn over supreme command in Shqiperi to him.

Max clapped a hand to his forehead. It happened to be the hand holding the sword, but he didn’t cut himself. “You are out of your mind,” he said.

“Yes, my dear, but I have fun.” I pulled him down to my height and kissed him on both cheeks. He said something in Hassocki I won’t repeat, even in translation. I laughed. Why not? The plot-a really pretty little plot, if I do say so myself-had started to move.

Another show down. Like most shows, it was measured more by what didn’t happen than by what did. Ilona didn’t come out of her costume. The lions didn’t eat Cadogan, or even sharpen their claws on him. The mammoth didn’t squash Ilona or any of the clowns. Max didn’t cut his throat, from the inside out or otherwise. And I didn’t splatter myself in the middle of the ring.

The marks ate it up anyway. Maybe we were better than usual. Maybe, what with everything that had happened to Thasos lately, they were starved for anything that might be amusing. I know which way I’d bet.

After the performance, I caught Max’s eye. He tried to pretend he didn’t see me: he made an elaborate production of lighting up a stogie that would do his cough a world of good. I walked over to him. “Come on,” I said. “The time has come. You’re not going to back out on me, are you?”

He looked as if he would have liked nothing better. But then, if you wait for Max to look enthusiastic, you’ll wait till the Final Prophecy comes true, and twenty minutes longer. Puffing a cloud of noxious smoke, he unfolded himself from his stool. He towered over me, and I’m not short. “Let’s get it over with,” he said, as if about to call on the tooth-drawer.

Side by side, we went up to Dooger and Cark. They were side by side, too, behind the table where they counted the take. As far as they were concerned, money counted for more than a couple of performers. Eventually, though, since we didn’t go away, they had to notice us, or to admit they did. Dooger looked over at Cark. “We’re at 2675,” he said.

“Yes, 2675,” Cark agreed in that nameless accent of his. They both wrote the figure down. The important business temporarily suspended, they could deal with the likes of us.

“What is it?” Dooger demanded of me. It had better be interesting, his tone warned. I don’t think he sleeps in a coffin, but I wouldn’t swear. I know bloody well he doesn’t sleep with me-and a good thing, too, says I.

Max coughed. It had nothing to do with the stinking cigar. It just gave him an excuse not to talk. Me, I never need an excuse to talk. “Boss-bosses-we quit,” I said. “We want our pay up through tonight.”

“You can’t do that,” Cark said. If what he gave us wasn’t the evil eye, I’ve never seen it. He’s a squat little toadlike fellow who doesn’t blink much at the best of times. When he’s angry, he doesn’t blink at all. It’s unnerving. It really is. You start wondering when you last paid a temple a proper visit.

I stood there and waited. Max stood there with me, Eliphalet bless him. Obviously, we could walk out whenever we cursed well pleased. Whether we could get paid…That was a more intricate question.

Dooger tilted his head back so he could look down his nose at me even though I was standing up. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Run off and be a king?” He laughed at his own joke. Even Cark let out a couple of dry little croaks that might have stood for amusement.

I bowed to each of them in turn. “How did you guess?” I answered. “And since you’re making free with the royal treasury…”

“We ought to throw you out on your arse, your Majesty.” Dooger turned it into a title of scorn. As if by real sorcery, a couple of hulking roustabouts appeared behind him.

Wheep! Max’s sword slid out of the scabbard. The blade glittered in the torchlight. I was so used to thinking of it as a prop for his act, I’d almost forgotten about it as a weapon. So, plainly, had Dooger and Cark. But any sword that would slice bread would do a pretty fair job of slicing circus proprietor, too.

“I think perhaps you might want to reconsider.” As usual, Max sounded as if he couldn’t care less whether he lived or died. That made him more scary, not less.

Dooger and Cark went back and forth in a nameless tongue, possibly Cark’s birthspeech. Cark gestured to the roustabouts. They vanished into the shadows as fast as they’d shown up. Maybe Dooger really had conjured them out of thin air. I wouldn’t put it past him.

He glared at us now. “We’ll pay you,” he said heavily. “We’ll pay you, all right, and we’ll blacken your names from Vyzance to Baile Atha Cliath.”

I laughed in his face. “As if telling anybody we had to work for Dooger and Cark’s wouldn’t do the job.”

Dooger said something in Yagmar. Off behind us, Ilona let out a yip of surprise and possibly horror, so it must have been choice. Without a word, Cark slammed coins down on the table. They came from all over the known world: Lokrian leptas and fractions, Hassocki piasters, dinars from from Vlachia, dinars from Belagora (which are heavier), a thaler or two out of the Dual Monarchy, a couple of livres from Narbonensis, some Schlepsigian krams, and a few shillings from Albion.

“Happy now?” Dooger growled when Cark stopped doling out silver.

“Let me use your scale,” I told him. That made him growl some more, and Cark, too. But they passed it over. When I got everything balanced, the alleged pay was light. Not by a lot, mind you, but light. I didn’t say anything. The scales spoke for themselves.

Muttering, Cark tossed a big silver cartwheel onto the left pan. The shekel from far-off Vespucciland almost made the scales balance. A sixth-dinar piece-silver so thin, you could almost see through it-evened things out. “Happy now?” Cark croaked.

“Delighted,” I told him. And I was, too. We had money, we had a plan, and the worst that could happen to us was death by torture. What was there to worry about?

I used the scales again, this time to make sure Max and I came out even. That sixth-dinar piece and a couple of others nearly as light proved handy for getting things right.

“You’re really leaving?” Ludovic said when we’d settled our business with the proprietors. “I don’t know whether to be angry or jealous.”

Cadogan looked glum enough to let his lions eat him. “I wish I could go, too,” he said, sounding almost as somber as Max.

“Why don’t you?” I asked.

He stared at me the way people always stare when you’ve asked a really stupid question. “Don’t be silly, Otto. Who’d take me if I left this outfit?” It wasn’t that he was wrong, either, poor bastard.

Ilona came up to me. Like Ludovic, she asked, “You’re really leaving?” When I nodded, she kissed me hard enough to make every hair in my mustache-among other things-stand on end.

Once I could see straight again, I wheezed, “Eliphalet! Why didn’t you ever do that before?”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “But, darling, you might have thought I meant it.” Before I could either grab her or slug her-Ilona usually made you want to do both at once-she adhered to Max. I don’t know how else to describe it. She kissed him even more thoroughly than she had me.

His eyes lit up. He wiggled his ears. He really did-the mammoth couldn’t have done it better. Color-veritable pink!-came into his sallow cheeks. All things considered, he looked amazingly lifelike. When the clinch finally broke-and he milked it for all it was worth and then some-he leered down at Ilona and murmured, “Well, sweetheart, are you a sword-swallower, too?”

She slapped him just as hard as she’d kissed him. The party went on from there.

It got drunk out, though not quite as drunk as it had the night we played our first show in Thasos. A good thing, too. I’m getting too old to do that as often as I used to. I don’t like to believe that. I don’t want to believe it. But my carcass reminds me of it more forcefully with each year that goes by.

Even Dooger and Cark, having finished counting their more or less ill-gotten gains, came over to hoist a few. Dooger put an arm around my shoulder. I kept my eye on his other hand, to make sure he didn’t try filching what Cark had been so pleased to pay me.

He affected not to notice. “Ah, my boy!” he said, sounding tiddlier than he was. “I love you like my own son!”

“Do you?” I said. “Is that the one you sold to the Tzigany?”

He laughed, though I hadn’t been upwards of two-sevenths kidding. “A funny man, too!” he said. “You should put on a clown suit and go on with the rest of that troupe. Otto the Impossible! You’d have star billing!”

“No, thanks,” I said, which is what anyone in his right mind should say when Dooger starts scheming. If saying no thanks doesn’t do the job, running away quickly may still save you. Since I was going to run away anyhow-for once in my life, not running away to join the circus-I went on, “I’d hate cleaning white greasepaint out of my mustache every night.”

“Shave it off.” As usual, Dooger had all the answers. Also as usual, most of them were to the wrong questions.

He and Cark tried to raise a stink about letting Max and me sleep in our wagons one more night after we’d left the company. Everybody else screamed at them. Even some of the roustabouts sided with us. And so, with poor grace, the proprietors backed down. I had the feeling they’d take it out on the rest of the company first chance they got.

The wagon’s springs creaked when I settled myself in my cot. I expected I’d wake up with a headache in the morning, but not with the galloping horrors I’d had not long before. Most headaches are soluble in Hassocki coffee.

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when the springs creaked again and the wagon shifted. Somebody besides me was in there. Roustabouts? Were Dooger and Cark going to throw me out after the rest of the company had gone to bed? Not without a fight, they weren’t. I reached out-and touched warm, smooth, bare flesh.

Ilona giggled. “If I’d done this before, darling,” she whispered, “you might have thought I meant it.” The springs did considerable creaking after that, let me tell you. I didn’t have a headache the next morning, either. Did she visit Max, too, before me or afterwards? To this day, I don’t know. I’m sorry for him if she didn’t, though.