Every Inch a King

X

Have you ever stood too close to a lightning strike, so that your heart forgets to beat for a moment and every hair on your head-and in more intimate places than that-stands out at full length? If you have, you will know some small part of what I felt just then.

Whatever I felt, I showed none of it. I was born in a carnival wagon, and I’ve been exhibiting myself to make my living ever since I got big enough not to piddle on the stage. If Max coughed a couple of times, then he coughed, that was all. Count Rappaport didn’t know what it meant, even if I did.

“Go tell it to the scribes,” I told him. “They always need something new to write about, and I don’t think any of them has come up with that yet.” By Eliphalet’s curly whiskers, I hoped not!

“Scribes are donkeys,” Count Rappaport said, in three words proving himself a man of uncommon common sense. He raked me with those eyes again, chill and sharp as the edge of an iceberg. “What you are, on the other hand…”

“‘What you are, on the other hand, your Highness,’” I prompted.

I do believe Rappaport’s waxed and spiky mustaches gave his sneer a certain superciliosity it wouldn’t have had without them. Be that as it may, I’ve seldom seen one that could approach, let alone match, it. “If you were Halim Eddin-” he began.

“North and south, east and west, he is none other,” Essad Pasha broke in before the man from the Dual Monarchy could go further-and before I had to say a word. “On this, your Excellency, I will take my oath.”

Count Rappaport’s arctic stare swung his way. “Why?”

“By his looks, first of all. I have met his Highness before, as he doubtless will recall…” Essad Pasha raised an eyebrow in my direction. I inclined my head, as royally as I could. He went on, “Further, did my memory falter, he is the spit and image of the portrait of the veritable Halim Eddin. Or will you doubt that, too, your Excellency?”

“A tolerable resemblance-but only tolerable, in my view,” Rappaport replied. “And to my ear, he speaks Schlepsigian like a native and speaks Hassocki like a native-Schlepsigian.”

“Thou art a fool, an empty purse,” I said in my very best and sweetest Hassocki. “Not a catapult made could knock out thy brains, for thou assuredly hast none.”

“The liar paints the honest man with his own brush, which is his chiefest shield against the truth.” The count seemed to dislike speaking to me at all, and was plainly glad to turn back to Essad Pasha. “You said his looks were your first reason for accepting this man at the value of his face. A first reason implies a second, which is…?”

Before answering, Essad Pasha fortified himself with a glass of spirits. After disposing of the one drop he was not allowed to drink, he gulped the rest. It was a good-sized glass. He went red-not altogether from drink, as it proved. In a low, furious, embarrassed voice, he said, “He mastered me, your Excellency. Do you hear? Do you understand? He mastered me. He came to me in Fushe-Kuqe, set his will against mine, and prevailed. I obey him. I can do nothing else, sir, for he is a veritable Hassocki prince, and soon to be a king. North and south, east and west, did I reckon him some low Schlepsigian mountebank, I should have fed him to a dragon. Instead, I watched him slay one with as fine a feat of archery as ever I have been privileged to see.”

Max coughed again. To tell you the truth, I felt like coughing myself. I wondered how long I would have lasted inside a dragon. Not as long as that vampire lasted inside the sea serpent, I suspected. Of course, under those circumstances, not lasting seemed preferable.

Essad Pasha bowed to me. “Here, your Highness, set in silver and on a silver chain, is the scale of the great worm you slew.” I bowed in return, and slid it down under my tunic. I wear it to this day.

Count Rappaport made a noise down deep in his throat: a low growl I would have thought to hear from Vuk Nedic. Rappaport’s silly uniform and sugary voice said one thing, his eyes and his manner something else again. It is often so with officials of the Dual Monarchy. If they were as foolish as they seemed, their kingdom empire would have crumbled to dust long, long ago.

“I shall have to make out a full report for my government,” the count said, in the tones of a judge passing sentence.

“When you do, make sure you write in it that I will be crowned tomorrow,” I said. “By all means come to the ceremony, your Excellency.”

“I would not miss it.” Count Rappaport bowed stiffly. He clicked his heels (he did a much smoother job of it than Untergraf Horst-Gustav, too). And then he did the best thing he could have done: he went away.

“I am sorry you were subjected to that, your Highness,” Essad Pasha said. “Please accept my apologies.”

“Your Excellency, you did nothing wrong,” I told him. “As for the Narbo”-a word the Hassocki will use for anyone who follows the Two Prophets and believes Eliphalet more sacred than Zibeon, whether actually Narbonese or not-“I will tread the unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him.”

“May it be so. North and south, east and west, may all his plans stumble and fall.” Essad Pasha’s fuming could hardly have been more visible if he’d puffed on a pipe. “You, a Schlepsigian! The very idea!” He threw back his head and laughed.

“A ridiculous notion,” Max agreed. He wouldn’t unbend far enough to seem relieved Essad Pasha thought so, but he did sound less ironic than usual.

“It is indeed, most valiant Yildirim,” Essad Pasha said. “One might as well suspect you of coming from Schlepsig, eh?”

“Me? I would sooner cut my throat.” Max drew his sword. Instead of slicing it across his neck, he swallowed a goodly length of the blade. Essad Pasha’s pouchy eyes bulged. All around the chamber, talk dried up as people turned to stare. Max might have created a bigger sensation by dropping his pants. On the other hand, he might not have.

With all eyes on him, Max withdrew the blade, conscientiously dried it on a napkin, and sheathed it once more. Then he took a skewer of chunks of fried meat. Everyone in the large room inhaled at once. I was glad to be quick; otherwise, there might not have been any air left. He pulled off the first gobbet with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Everyone exhaled, a bit regretfully. The show was over-for the moment, anyhow.

“Truly, your Highness, your aide-de-camp is a man of parts,” Essad Pasha remarked in the much too calm tones a man will use only when trying his best not to show how shaken or impressed he is.

“I would not deny it for a moment, your Excellency. Some of those parts, however, are wont to be more useful than others.” If the slightest of edges came into my own voice, well, who could blame me for that?

Max bowed low, first to me and then to Essad Pasha, as if we’d paid him undoubted compliments. “I seek to show what any who oppose his Highness may expect,” he said.

Essad Pasha bowed almost as low as Max had, which, considering the belly hindering him, wasn’t easy. “That is well said,” he boomed. “North and south, east and west, that is very well said.” He turned to me. “You are fortunate in your servants.”

“Yes, I know,” I said blandly. Max coughed. I hadn’t expected anything else. “Good thing you didn’t do that with the sword in there,” I murmured.

“Not like I haven’t done it before,” he answered, and I knew that was true. “I spit red when it happens, so I don’t spit for a while then, that’s all.”

“Such a gentleman,” I told him. His bow was even deeper than the last one.

Count Potemkin came shambling up to me then, a glass in each hand, his eyes glittering, his earth-apple of a nose as red as if it grew on a tree. “You gave the lout from the Dual Monarchy his comeuppance,” he said in elegant, accentless Narbonese. Most Tverski nobles are fluent in it, which is fortunate, for it saves other people the bother of learning their language. Tverski has more cases than Caledonia Yard, and a battery of choking and gargling noises that make a man speaking it sound as if he’s trying to strangle himself.

I speak good Narbonese myself, so I understood him. Halim Eddin, however, was more limited. “Do you speak Schlepsigian?” I asked Count Potemkin in that language.

“Only if I must,” he answered grumpily. In Schlepsigian, he had a Tverski accent, and a strong one. He translated his comment. It sounded much ruder than it had before. Maybe it lost-or gained-something in the translation. Or maybe Narbonese puts a veneer of false politeness on almost anything. Not by accident is it the language of diplomacy…for now. As a good Schlepsigian patriot, I dare hope a change is coming.

But that is by the way. I had to find some diplomatic (oh, well) way to respond. “I am who I am,” I said, with which not even the bibulous Potemkin could disagree. “I have the duty to defend myself and what is to be my kingdom.”

“Your kingdom? Pah!” Count Potemkin said. Some Tverskis make a sport of being rude. Maybe Potemkin was one of those. Or maybe he was drunk. Then again, maybe he’d seen more of Shqiperi than I thought and was giving his honest opinion. You never can tell. Whatever the answer to that riddle, he went on, “Leave Vlachia and Belagora alone, and Tver will not trouble you.”

“How generous!” I exclaimed, wondering if he could recognize sarcasm (at that moment, I wasn’t altogether convinced he could recognize himself). But that sounded like something the Poglavnik of Tver’s representative would say. Tver thinks of itself as the big brother of the Plovdivians, the Vlachs (in both Vlachia and Belagora), and the Vlachs’ close cousins the Hrvats. They all speak related languages, and they’re all Zibeonites except the Hrvats, who have the good sense to accept Eliphalet’s primacy.

Using this big brotherdom as an excuse, Tver has fought a lot of wars with the Hassockian Empire, and won most of them. Since Tver would have to charge all the way across the Nekemte Peninsula to get at Shqiperi, I wasn’t too worried about Potemkin’s threat, if that was what it was.

Count Rappaport probably wouldn’t take such a relaxed view of it. There is no Kingdom of Hrvatsk. There hasn’t been one for centuries, ever since the Hrvats suffered through their disastrous vowel famine. The Hrvats live in the Dual Monarchy. So do some Vlachs. So do some Torinans. So do the Yagmars. So do most of the Schlepsigians who don’t live in Schlepsig. So do the Voslaks and the Voslenes, who are not the same (though only they care). So do the Prahans, who aren’t quite the same as the Voslaks (or is it the Voslenes?), either. So do some Dacians, and all the Gdanskers who don’t live in Schlepsig or Tver (no more Kingdom of Gdansk, either, which is what you get for ending up stuck between Schlepsig and Tver and the Dual Monarchy). So do…I could go on.

It’s a complicated place-or, if you’d rather, just a bloody mess.

So when Tver appoints itself the Hrvats’ big brother, the king-emperor of the Dual Monarchy is just as Not Amused as the late Queen of Albion. I don’t mean she was Not Amused at the Hrvats; I’d bet money she never once heard of them. But I suppose she had other things not to amuse her.

Potemkin was thinking. It took a while. You could watch the wheels turn, like the ones on a milk wagon pulled by a lazy horse. In due course, he said, “You trouble our friends, we trouble you.”

I put my hand on the blue velvet sleeve of his jacket. “I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear fellow,” I said. I might do it, but I had better things to dream about.

“Don’t touch the coat!” He shook me off. “You listen and you listen good, or you be sorry.” Yes, he was what Tver calls a diplomat.

“I’m all ears,” I assured him. “North and south, east and west, I am nothing but ears. Even my eyes are ears. Even my toenails are ears.”

Those wheels inside Count Potemkin’s head slowly started turning once more. This time, I watched them stop: Potemkin gave up thinking as a bad job. “You listen,” he said again. “Maybe you lucky, coming out here to middle of nowhere. When Tver takes Vyzance, no room for Hassocki princes there no more.”

He could have said it better in Narbonese, I’m sure. Bad grammar aside, what he meant was plain enough. Tver has always lusted after the capital of the Hassockian Empire the way a callow boy lusts after a stage actress. She might be a clapped-out old whore-Eliphalet will testify Vyzance is-but he doesn’t know that, or care. All he knows is, he wants her.

I yawned in Count Potemkin’s face. “The Tverski who will lay hold of Vyzance has not been born, nor has his grandfather’s grandfather.” Switching to Hassocki, I went on, “So take thyself off, thou infinite and endless liar, thou hourly promise-breaker, thou owner of no one good quality.”

“Whoreson mandrake, thy pisspot kingdom is the canker of a calm world and a long peace, and thou provest thyself fit to rule it,” he retorted in the same language, and lumbered away.

You just can’t tell with some people, that’s all.

Taken as a whole, I suppose the evening at the fortress was a success. Nobody challenged anyone else to a duel. And no one except Barisha and the delightful Potemkin threatened to go to war. (As if anyone who didn’t have the influence to escape being consigned to Peshkepiia would have the influence to send his kingdom to war!) Even more to the point, as far as I was concerned, no one except Count Rappaport doubted I was who I said I was, and no one seemed to take him seriously.

When I went to the Metropolis’ dining room for breakfast, a pack of ministers semiplenipotentiary and another pack of scribes set upon me. I wished they would have found satisfaction in one another. Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland, for instance, talked enough to keep any four men or eight scribes happy. But no. I was the man of the hour, and they all were either mad to talk to me or to hear me talk.

“Just what you always wanted, our Highness,” Max said with a sour smirk in his voice. That would have stung had it held less truth. Being the man of the hour was what I’d always wanted. Be careful what you want, then-you may get it.

You may also eventually get breakfast. None of Hoxha’s cooks challenged any of the others to a duel, either, though they constantly seemed on the edge of it. Coffee, fried fowl, fried eggs, fried bread (which surprised me by proving tasty), fried sausage (which surprised me by proving even nastier than I expected, and I thought I was braced for the wurst). Everyone kept on telling me things or shouting questions at me while I ate. I wasn’t king yet, so I couldn’t even order people beheaded.

For that matter, I didn’t know where I would be crowned (or even coronated-yes, Bob was there). I didn’t know where my palace was, either. Peshkepiia didn’t seem the sort of place that had palaces hidden away up back alleys.

I headed for the fortress to find Essad Pasha. And I did: he was heading for the hostel to find me. “Your Highness,” he said, bowing low.

“Your Excellency.” I bowed back. Essad Pasha’s bodyguards and Max bowed to one another. It was all very polite. When men carrying a variety of lethal hardware meet on the street, politeness is to be admired and desired. I went on, “I was coming to ask you about the coronation ceremony.”

“Well, good, because I was coming to tell you about it.” Essad Pasha looked as affable as a senior officer in the army of the Hassockian Empire was likely to look unless he was plotting something really nefarious. “What would you like to know?”

“Where will it be, to begin with?” I said. “And where will I dwell once I wear the crown?”

“And will his Majesty’s harem dwell there as well?” Max added. “He is too much a gentleman to speak of such things on his own, but naturally it is a matter rousing some curiosity on his part.”

Rousing, indeed. If it didn’t rouse some curiosity on Max’s part, and if I didn’t know which part of Max was roused, I would have been very surprised. None of which meant my sword-swallowing aide-de-camp was mistaken. Those questions did rouse my curiosity, among other things.

And Essad Pasha seemed to find all the questions reasonable enough. “You will be crowned, naturally, in the Quadrate God’s fane,” he replied. “That way, your mystical affinity with the land you are to rule will spread north and south, east and west, over the entire kingdom. So may it be.”

“So may it be,” I echoed. After two terms in the Hassockian Army, I thought I knew enough about the Quadrate God’s rituals so I wouldn’t give myself away.

“As for your residence,” Essad Pasha went on, “if you would be so kind as to come with me…”

Off we went, into the back alleys of Peshkepiia. We strode through a market square that had some of the sorriest meat and vegetables and leather goods and, well, everything else, too, that I’d ever seen. It also had the largest assortment of coins passing current that I’d ever seen-probably that anyone has ever seen. Most likely because Shqiperi doesn’t coin for itself, everyone’s money is good here. You see everything from Hassocki piasters to Albionese shillings and even shekels from Vespucciland across the sea. If someone came out of the mountains after digging up a hoard of Aenean silver, that wouldn’t have fazed the merchants. They all had scales-and, no doubt, all had their thumbs on them whenever they thought they could get away with it.

Peshkepiia’s sewage system is largely a matter of rumor. I was repeatedly glad Hassockian Army uniform includes knee-high boots. We did considerable squelching. Some of the things we walked through…Well, I didn’t get a good look at them, and I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t.

Essad Pasha paused. “Behold, Your Highness-Your Majesty very soon to be-your palace. I hope it pleases you.”

May Eliphalet’s curse smite me with boils if it didn’t. There it was: a real palace-a little one, but without a doubt a palace-right where I’d never dreamt there could be any such thing. It was charming, even elegant, in the sinuous Hassocki style. And if there was a wigmaker’s shop across the muddy street and a horseleech’s establishment next door-somehow that added to the charm instead of taking away from it.

“How did it get here?” I asked. I probably would have asked the same question the same way if I’d seen a daffodil sprouting from a cow flop. Given Peshkepiia’s general atmosphere, that was more likely than this.

“I believe a governor built it some years ago for his lady love,” Essad Pasha answered. “So I was told when I came to Shqiperi, anyhow.”

“Why were you living in the fortress and not here, your Excellency?” Max asked: a much more bluntly sensible query than the one I’d come up with. Max is a useful fellow. You never need to think the worst of anyone while he’s around, since he’ll do it for you.

Essad Pasha coughed once or twice himself-he doesn’t do it as well as Max-and sent me what might have been a look of appeal. I pretended either not to notice it or to misunderstand it. “Yes, why were you?” I asked, as if that were simply the most interesting question I’d ever heard in my life.

He thought about telling some spun-sugar fairy tale. Then, of themselves, his eyes went to Max’s sword. Max’s hand wasn’t on the hilt, but it wasn’t far away. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, as an Albionese poet once said, conscience being the still, small voice that tells us someone may call us a damned liar. That last definition comes from a Schlepsigian actor, acrobat, showman, soldier of fortune, and-briefly-king.

Instead of spinning the fairy tale, Essad Pasha said, “I judged the fortress more secure. But, with a proper guard contingent and with popular goodwill, your Highness-your Majesty soon, as I say-should be more than safe enough here.”

More than safe enough for whom? I wondered. The only thing Essad Pasha knew about popular goodwill was that he’d never had any. “The harem is already installed here?” I asked him.

He brightened. “Oh, yes, your Highness. The quarters are admirable for the purpose. That governor may have built this palace for one favorite, but he entertained the possibility of entertaining more here.” He sent me a manly smirk.

I also pretended not to notice that. For once, I found a relevant question ahead of Max: “The royal treasury is already installed here?”

Essad Pasha looked as if my intrepid aide-de-camp had just sliced off the first two inches of his manhood and was poised to take more (assuming he had more). Again, he seemed poised to lie. Again, he decided lying wasn’t a good idea; I would have no trouble checking. “Ah, not yet,” he said in slightly strangled tones.

“You will attend to that at once, your Excellency, won’t you?” I bore down on the last two words. I didn’t say what would happen if Essad Pasha failed to attend to it at once. Sometimes it’s better to let a man use his imagination. Even someone like Essad Pasha, seemingly born without any such thing, can, when pressed, form the most remarkable pictures in his mind.

“Yes, your Highness.” He sounded resigned if not transported with delight.

“Good,” I said. “For if I am to be king here, I shall be king here. North and south, east and west, this land and all in it are mine. And it will have a proper coinage.” I scratched at my mustaches. I rather fancied my face on silver and gold, I did. Instead of saying so, I went on, “A proper Shqipetari coinage would go a long way towards insuring popular goodwill, eh? And towards insuring a proper guard contingent here, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“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!