Every Inch a King

III

Max and I even got breakfast the next morning. If Dooger and Cark didn’t deduct the cost of our rolls and honey and coffee from the company’s share, they were missing a trick, and they don’t miss many tricks like that. And speaking of a roll with honey, Ilona was sweetly impersonal to me and to Max both. Her manner said nothing had happened in the nighttime-and even if it had, it hadn’t.

She did kiss us goodbye, on the cheek; she stood on tiptoe and Max bent down so she could reach his. Then, duffels slung over our shoulders, we were on our own. Max looked as if his rowboat had just sunk in sea-serpent-infested waters. I felt a little rocky myself, to tell you the truth. Not having the troupe at my back was daunting. These were the people who were always ready, when things seemed bad, to tell you why they were really worse. They were also the people who would try to pitch in and make them better. And now we’d turned our backs on them.

“Well,” Max said lugubriously, “what next, your Majesty?” He didn’t make that as noxious as Dooger had the night before. From him, it felt more like you sap.

I’d been thinking about what next, in the odd moments when I wasn’t thinking about Ilona or about almost getting skinned by Dooger and Cark. “We’re playing roles, right?” I said. “Roles, yes, except on the stage of life, not the one where they throw cabbages if you blow your lines.”

“They’ll do worse than that if we blow our lines,” Max said.

Ignoring him, I went on, “If we’re playing roles, what do we need?”

“Better sense?” he suggested.

He was getting harder to ignore, but I managed. I am a man of many talents. “We need costumes,” I said. “If I remember rightly, Prince Halim Eddin is a colonel in the Hassocki army. And if you’re going to be my aide-de-camp, you should be a captain or something.”

“If I’m going to be your aide-de-camp, I should have my head examined,” Max said.

“Did anyone candle thy skull, he’d doubtless find it empty,” I said in Hassocki.

“Better empty than full of thy madness, the which is worse than a dog’s and more assuredly fatal,” Max replied in the same language. His accent was improving with practice.

He didn’t ask me where we would come by Hassocki officers’ uniforms. The atabeg’s officers-and men-had done everything they could to escape when forces from Lokris and Plovdiv converged on Thasos. Everything included shedding their uniforms and sneaking away in civilian clothes-or, for all I knew, naked. All the tailor’s shops in Threadneedle Street displayed discarded dusty-brown Hassocki military togs. We could pick and choose.

Or I could, anyway. I am a good-sized man, but neither enormously tall nor enormously wide. The second tailor we visited had exactly what I needed, right down to the boots and the belt buckle and the epaulets. We haggled for a while. He even knocked off another piaster and a half when I noticed a very neatly repaired tear in the back of the jacket. It was about what a rapier would have made going in.

No sign of a bloodstain around it, even on the inside of the material. Cold water will soak them out if you’re patient, and who ever heard of an impatient tailor?

But when I asked about a captain’s uniform for Max, this fellow bowed and shook his head. “My liver is wrung, O most noble one,” he said in Hassocki, which we’d been using, “but I have none fit for a man of his, ah, altitude.”

“No, no.” Max shook his head. “Otto is his Highness here.”

The tailor scratched his head. I made as if to kick Max. Without moving a muscle, he let me know that wouldn’t be a good idea. I turned back to the tailor. “Know you, my good man, if any of your colleagues might have attire suitable to his stature?”

“I know not, I fear me. It is written, Seek and ye may find.”

I’d always heard it as Seek and ye shall find. Considering how Max is put together, the tailor’s version made better sense. “Verily, it is so written, or if it be not written so, so should it be written,” I said. He was chewing on that as Max and I left his shop. Max looked as if he was also chewing on that, or possibly on his cud. By the time we’d walked into the next tailor’s shop, I was chewing on it myself. It certainly sounded as if it ought to mean something, whether it did or not.

We ended up walking into every tailor’s establishment on Threadneedle Street. Every tailor without exception took one dismayed look at Max, rolled his eyes, shook his head, and threw up his hands. “I’m not cut out to be an aide-de-camp,” Max said. “Maybe I should go as your stepladder instead.”

“Did Eliphalet lose heart when he faced the Tharpian King of Kings?” I demanded. “Keep your chin up, man.”

He did. It made him look even taller. He must have known as much, too, for he said, “Eliphalet wasn’t six feet eight.”

“Not on the outside,” I said, and cribbed from a hymn: “In spirit he was ten feet tall.”

“Nobody ever tries to put your spirit in a uniform,” Max said, which was true but so resolutely unhelpful that I pretended not to hear it.

Right next to Threadneedle Street is Copperbottom Alley. That’s not where the tinkers and potmakers work; their establishments are along the Street of the Boiled Second Stomach-a Hassocki delicacy that loses something in the translation and even more, I assure you, in the ingestion. No, Copperbottom Alley houses secondhand shops and houses of the three gold globes and other not quite shady, not quite sunny enterprises. I was sure we could buy Hassocki captain’s uniforms there; I was fairly sure we could buy ourselves a couple of Hassocki captains, if for some reason we happened to need them.

Whether we could find a uniform to fit Max…Well, I wasn’t so sure about that, but I wasn’t about to admit I wasn’t so sure, either.

When we walked into the first secondhand shop, the proprietor, a round little Hassocki, shook his head. “I am wounded to the very heart of me that I find myself unable to aid my masters,” he said, “but perhaps they will seek the place of business of Manolis the Lokrian. North and south, east and west, by the strength of my bowels no one else in Thasos is more likely to possess that which, should you acquire it, would make your spirits sing.”

Manolis the Lokrian proved to run a house of the three gold globes halfway along Copperbottom Alley. Luckily, he wrote his name on the window in Hassocki characters as well as his own. A bell above his door jangled when Max and I went in.

“Gentlemen, I am at your service. Ask of me what you would,” he said. He bowed and straightened and bowed again.

I didn’t ask him anything at once. I was too busy staring. I saw at once why the roly-poly Hassocki had sent us to him. He had to be an inch or two taller even than Max. The two of them were also staring at each other. Very tall men aren’t used to running into people their own size. They need to decide who’s bigger and how surprised they’re going to be about it.

“Have you by any chance a Hassocki captain’s uniform to fit my friend?” I asked.

He broke out laughing. “I do,” he said. “I do. By Zibeon’s forelock, I do. I have the very thing.” I reminded myself he was a Lokrian, and so unlikely to know better. I also reminded myself how big he was. Taller than Max! Who would have believed it? He went on, “During the, ah, late unpleasantness I purchased this from an officer desirous of decamping in such secrecy as he might-though when a man is of his stature, or mine, or your friend’s, secrecy is hard to come by. Later”-he preened his mustaches between thumb and forefinger-“I had occasion to wear it, to personate the fled Hassocki and lure his comrades out of a strong and safe position. This I accomplished.” He stood even straighter than usual.

So the uniform had already been used in one masquerade, had it? A paltry scheme next to mine-but still, I took it for a good omen. I said, “May we see this famous outfit?”

Manolis bowed once more. “Certainly, my master. Certainly. But what ails your friend? Can he not speak for himself?”

“No,” Max croaked. “I never learned how.”

The Lokrian broker scratched his head, tugged at his mustaches again, and disappeared into a back room. He returned with a neatly folded dust-brown uniform. Unfolded, it did indeed prove suitable for a man of Max’s inches. The sleeves and trouser legs were slightly too short, but only slightly. It fit Max a good deal better than it would have Manolis, who was not only taller but wider through the shoulders and had the beginnings of a paunch. Imagining Max with a paunch is like imagining a nightingale with a bagpipe. I doubted the Hassocki who saw Manolis in disguise were inclined to be critical. Anyone who could wear that uniform without turning it into a tent had to carry conviction.

I spoke next with a certain amount of worry: “Ah, how much might you want for such an item, O most heroic and valiant one?”

“Well, I had not really purposed selling it at all,” Manolis replied. “My thought was to save it for my grandchildren, a token of the time when Thasos passed out of slavery and into freedom.” Half the city’s populace would have juggled nouns and prepositions there, but never mind. He continued, “If I were to sell it, I should need to be suitably compensated for the future loss to my heirs and assigns.”

“What do you reckon suitable compensation?” I inquired, more cautiously yet.

He named a price. I did not faint. I do not know why I did not faint. I merely state the fact. He added, “I suspect you may encounter a certain amount of difficulty finding such a uniform here or elsewhere.”

I suspected he was right. No, I knew too well he was right. Nevertheless, I said, “And I suspect you are a saucy robber. Dust-brown cloth is cheap as pistachios in Thasos right now. I could have a tailor make me a uniform for half what you ask.” That would still cost too much and take too long, something Manolis did not need to know.

He scowled down at me. A fearsome scowl from such a giant would have put most men of ordinary size in fear for their lives. I, however, am bold beyond the mean-and used to Max scowling down at me. Again, the hair of the dog that now could not bite me. Seeing me unafraid and unabashed, Manolis named a more reasonable figure. I named one in return. “Why, thou brazen son of a poison-tongued serpent!” he cried.

“Impute to me not thy parentage,” I said sweetly.

“Thou admittest thy brazenness, I see, which is as well, for thou wouldst prove thyself liar as well as cheat didst thou seek to disclaim it.” Manolis scowled again, and clenched his big fists. When I still failed to wilt, he came down some more.

We haggled through the morning. Just after he called me something too infamous even to repeat, he poured coffee for Max and me with his own hands. Both the insult and the coffee were politenesses of the trade. As noon approached, we struck a bargain. It was more than I wanted to pay but less than a tailor would have cost me: not perfect, but good enough. In this sorry world of ours, good enough is…good enough.

Manolis’ sigh would have sailed a schooner halfway to Vyzance. “Thus vanishes a part of Thasos’ history, and a grand part, too.” My silver also vanished, into a stout cashbox he kept under the counter. So much for history, at least to the Lokrian.

As for me, I had all I could do to keep from jumping in the air and clicking my heels together as we left the house of the three gold globes. Manolis might have thought he was making history with the tall Hassocki’s uniform, but Max would really do it. (Of course, he would be but a footnote to my reign, but even so…)

His own view of all this was rather less exalted. “Nice to know I’ll be properly dressed for my execution,” he remarked.

“If you get any more cheerful, I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand the joy,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Is that what they call sarcasm?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard the word before. What does it mean?” I said.

Max pondered that. It seemed to satisfy him, for he nodded. “Where now?” he asked.

“Why, the port,” I said. “Unless you’d rather go to Shqiperi by land, that is.”

“I don’t much want to go to Shqiperi at all,” he said.

Normally, this is a sentiment with a great deal to recommend it. In fact, almost the entire world has wanted to avoid the Land of the Eagle throughout its history, which is how the Shqipetari have ended up living there. Nevertheless, going by land, through the sputtering remains of the Nekemte Wars, struck me as an idea singularly bad even by the standards associated with Shqiperi. “The port,” I said again, and set off toward the sea. Max? Max followed me.

People write poems about the open sea: the waves and the wind and the soaring gulls and I don’t know what all else. I’m a showman, not a poet. But I do know one thing: nobody in his right mind pens poems about a harbor.

For one thing, it’s hard to wax poetic about stinks. The open sea smells fresh and, well, oceanic, at least till you go belowdecks. The port of Thasos, on the other hand, smells like the Darvar River, which runs into it. And the Darvar River, not to put too fine a point on it, smells like sewage.

Along with this ruling theme, there are grace notes: bilgewater from the ships tied up at the quays, essence of unwashed sailor, cheap perfume from the joy girls the unwashed sailors seek, the occasional dead dog or dead body, and other stenches, reeks, and miasmas. My asthma would have been very bad there, if I’d had any to begin with.

Shqiperi’s chief port-indeed, for all practical purposes, Shqiperi’s only port-is the grand metropolis of Fushe-Kuqe, which is every bit as famous and magnificent as the fact that you’ve never heard of it would suggest.

The harbormaster was a lean, weathered Hassocki named Bayezid. He looked like a recently-perhaps too recently-retired pirate. A big gold hoop glittered in his left ear. His right earlobe was oddly scarred and shriveled, as if a big gold hoop had been removed from it by force. He, unlike you, had heard of Fushe-Kuqe; his job involved knowing the ports around the Middle Sea, even the sleepy and obscure ones.

When I said we wanted to go there, he raised an elegantly plucked eyebrow. “You do?” he said. “North and south, east and west, my masters, why?”

“To put on a performance-a special performance,” I replied, which was true enough. All the same, Max choked slightly.

Bayezid affected not to notice. “You will know your own business best, I am sure,” he murmured, and I’ve never been called an idiot more politely. He gathered himself. “There is, I fear, no way to book passage straight from Thasos to Fushe-Kuqe. Commerce between the two cities…Well, to be candid, there is no commerce between the two cities.”

Max brightened, no doubt hoping he was off the hook. I contrived to tread on his toes, not too hard. “There is bound to be a direct route from Thasos to Lakedaimon,” I said.

“Oh, yes.” The harbormaster nodded and looked pained at the same time. I might have known he would: Lakedaimon is the capital of Lokris, and he could not have felt too kindly toward Lokrians just then. He proved as much, in fact, continuing, “Had you come here a week later, I daresay you would have found a man from that other kingdom”-he wouldn’t even dignify Lokris by naming it-“in my place. He might have been able to find Fushe-Kuqe on a map, assuming he could read. But as for getting you there…” That elegant eyebrow climbed again.

“Since we are lucky enough to have you in his stead, your Excellency, perhaps in your sagacity you will be able to assist us.” Hassocki is almost as good for flowery compliments as it is for insults.

Bayezid bowed. “I am your slave.” He pointed to a pier a furlong or so to the west of his cramped and tiny office. “Yonder lies the Keraunos. The name means Thunderbolt in that kingdom’s tongue. She sails for Lakedaimon at the fourth hour of the afternoon, and is due there at the same time tomorrow.” His eyebrow went up once more. “She will be late. I hope she will not be too late to keep you from catching the Halcyon, which sails for Fushe-Kuqe at midnight from the Quay of the Red-Figure Winecup.”

He checked no references, no schedules or almanacs or anything of the sort. He knew. I didn’t envy the Lokrian who would replace him, even if the man was good. Bayezid was a lot better than merely good.

“What if we’re too late to catch the Halcyon?” I asked.

“North and south, east and west, all is as the Quadrate God wills,” the harbormaster said, which told me less than it might have. But he went on, “Three days after that, my master, the Gamemeno sails out of Lakedaimon from the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. After, ah, several stops, she too will put in at Fushe-Kuqe.” Again, no books, but he knew.

That sounded inauspicious. Max summed up just how inauspicious it sounded by asking, “Is she a smuggler or a pirate, the Gamemeno?”

“Yes,” Bayezid answered.

“Well,” I said as brightly as I could, “we’ll just have to hope the, uh, Keraunos won’t be late.”

“Good luck, my friend,” Bayezid said, plainly meaning, You’ll need it. He added one word more: “Lokrians.” From everything I’ve ever seen, Lokrians are not the most punctual people in the world-and, as a man of Schlepsig, I ought to know a thing or two about punctuality. From everything I’ve seen, though, Hassocki are the one folk who might out-delay Lokrians. I somehow doubted the curse of tardiness hovered over Bayezid’s head, but it does afflict his countrymen.

When I tried to tip the harbormaster for his trouble and his help, he turned me down flat. Truly he was a man in a thousand. I don’t think I’d ever met a Hassocki who wouldn’t pocket a little baksheesh before. Come to that, plenty of Schlepsigians wouldn’t have been sorry to listen to a few extra coins jingle in their pockets. But he told me no-Eliphalet be my witness. If the Lokrians sacked him, their new man would have made them sorry in short order.

Max and I walked up the quay to the Thunderbolt. Bird droppings dappled the planks under our feet. A pelican glided by overhead, looking like a gull apprenticed to a dragon. Seeing something that size on the wing made me glad I had a hat.

“Ahoy!” I called when we got to the ship. I must say its appearance didn’t live up to its name. It was beamy and weary-looking, with untidy rigging and a crew who couldn’t have been more than two steps up from pirates. Half of them wore earrings to put Bayezid’s to shame.

The skipper, however, had on a uniform with more plumes and epaulets and tassels and-rather tarnished-gold braid than the Grand High Admiral of Schlepsig’s. Old Forkbeard, of course, commands ships of the line and frigates by the score, whereas this fellow had the Keraunos, Prophets help him. He looked down at us with no great liking from under the brim of his three-cornered hat and asked, “What you want?” in fair Narbonese.

“Passage to Lakedaimon, sir,” I answered in the same language.

He sized us up. I did the same with him. He was a sour, pinch-faced fellow heading into middle age and no happier about it than anyone else. Calculation glittered in his eyes, which were set too close together. Judging what the traffic will bear, I decided. The fare he named showed he’d misjudged it-either that or greed had got the better of him.

I bowed. “Good day to you, sir, and may your voyage be prosperous,” I said. “We are not murderers on the run, to take passage regardless of the price. Let’s go, Max.” We started back toward the harbormaster’s office.

“Thou wouldst suck seeds from a sick sow’s turds,” he said in Hassocki, before adding, “Do not go,” in Narbonese.

I spoke in Hassocki, too: “An I did, I’d kiss thy mother.” I did wait, to see what would happen next.

Those close-set eyes widened. For a moment, I thought he’d turn his cutthroats loose on Max and me, but he decided it was funny instead and laughed his head off. “The foreign gentleman took me by surprise, knowing this language so well,” he said, speaking Hassocki far more fluently than he did Narbonese. He added something in gurgling Lokrian that probably meant, Do you understand my language, too? I just dipped my head the way Lokrians will when they mean yes and looked wise. He could make whatever he wanted of that.

He didn’t haggle so hard in Hassocki as he would have in Narbonese. My knowing one of the local languages made me seem less foreign to him. I wasn’t someone who existed only to be gouged. We got a cabin for a pretty good rate.

The sailor who led us to the cabin spoke some Hassocki. “Is crowded space. You two fit?” He sounded genuinely anxious for our comfort, no matter how villainous he looked. I don’t know if he was, but he sounded that way.

“If I don’t break my skull on these cursed beams beforehand,” Max grumbled. The Keraunos’ corridors and passageways were not made for a man of his inches. In fact, they weren’t made for a man of my inches, and I own fewer than Max. He had to walk stooped over whenever he was belowdecks, and the crossbeams or whatever you call them were a special hazard. No matter how careful he tried to be, he banged his head two or three times before we got to the cabin.

“Is all right?” The sailor opened the door. We ducked inside.

It was crowded. No room to swing a cat, I’ve heard sailors say. Why anyone would want to do that to a poor harmless cat is beyond me, but never mind. Next to the room we don’t have in a circus wagon, though, that little cabin might have been a palace. As a matter of fact, it was nearly as grand as the Shqipetari royal palace, but I didn’t know that yet.

I reached into my pocket and gave the sailor the two coins I pulled out: a piaster and a semilepta. He bowed like a folding jackknife. “Zibeon’s blessings upon you, my master!” he said, and scurried away. I would rather have had Eliphalet’s, but in that part of the world you take what you can get.

You also do your best to make sure other people don’t take what they can get-or, rather, that they can’t get it. I had the lock that kept light-fingered strangers (and, no doubt, light-fingered acquaintances, too) out of my wagon when I wasn’t around. I wasn’t worried about taking it. Whoever Dooger and Cark hired to replace me would have a lock of his own. I put it on the cabin door now. It was cold iron, so I hoped it would be proof against wizardry as well as lockpicks.

“Do you suppose it’s the fourth hour of the afternoon yet?” I asked Max.

He looked out the little round window-all right, the porthole; I’m no sailor, and I don’t pretend to be one-to gauge the sun. “Getting close, anyhow,” he answered.

“Does it seem we’re about to leave the harbor?”

He shook his head. A ship’s crew always goes a little mad when they set sail or weigh anchor or do whatever they need to do to start. I don’t know why they need to weigh the anchor; isn’t knowing the bloody thing’s heavy enough? But when they do it, people run every which way and shout like men possessed. If the wind isn’t favorable, and it usually isn’t, the weatherworker stands at the stern to call it into the sails.

In the old days, you just sat there if the wind wasn’t favorable. You could sit there for weeks if luck went against you. And if the wind died while you were at sea, at sea you’d stay. Weatherworking is one of the marvels of the modern age, but most people take it for granted. It’s a good thing the Two Prophets lived long ago; nowadays, everyone would yawn at the miracles they worked.

No weather was being worked at the stern. Sailors weren’t running back and forth above our heads. I know the sound-it puts me in mind of a herd of shoes. Nobody was shouting. As if to prove the point, a tern a gull had robbed of a fish screeched furiously.

“Maybe we ought to see what’s going on,” I said.

“I can see what’s going on,” Max said. “Nothing, that’s what.”

Sometimes Max can be annoyingly literal. “Maybe we should find out why nothing’s going on,” I said. Max only shrugged. I asked him, “Do you really want to get stuck in Lakedaimon for days?”

He jumped to his feet-and banged his head. After rubbing the latest bruise, he said, “Lead on-carefully, if you please.”

I carefully locked the cabin door behind us. We made our way to the steep stair that led us up on deck. Max hit his head once more, but only once. Considering how low the ceiling was, that amounted to a triumph of sorts. By then, though, Max was thoroughly out of sorts. He breathed a sigh of relief when he could unfold himself on deck.

The captain was drinking coffee and smoking a pipe with a long stem and a bowl carved into the shape of a leaping dolphin. It looked very nautical. Anyone who didn’t know better would think he’d got it from some clever, grizzled Lokrian craftsman who’d taken weeks to shape it especially for him. Unfortunately, I did know better. Any Schlepsigian would. We use the law of similarity to turn out those pipes by the tens of thousands for home use and the export trade. About every fourth man in Schlepsig smokes one. So it goes.

He seemed surprised to see us. “Is something amiss, my masters? Your cabin does not suit you? It is the best we had left.”

I daresay it was, too: a judgment on the Keraunos, I fear. But that, for the moment, was beside the point. “Our cabin will serve,” I said. “Is it not yet the fourth hour of the afternoon, however?”

He set a languid glance toward the hourglass set in front of the wheel. As languidly, he dipped his head in agreement. “Why, yes. I do believe it is.”

“And is not this ship scheduled to sail at the fourth hour of the afternoon?” I asked with such patience as I could muster. A Schlepsigian ship would have sailed when scheduled, come what may. To my people, schedules are as sacred as if Eliphalet and Zibeon wrote each and every one. The wagons roll on time in Schlepsig, let me assure you.

Other folk, I fear, have other notions. “Oh. The schedule,” the skipper said, as if he’d forgotten such a thing existed. He probably had, too. He shrugged one of those elaborate shrugs that are only too common all over the Nekemte Peninsula. What those shrugs say is, You’re cursed well stuck, sucker, and you can’t do a thing about it, so scream as much as you please-it won’t do you any bloody good. He waited, no doubt hoping I would start screaming. But I’ve seen those shrugs before. Indeed I have. I waited, too. He sighed, balked of his sport. “Well, my master, we will sail-pretty soon.”

Pretty soon, in those parts, can mean anything from a couple of hours to a couple of months. “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.

“Oh, this and that.” He gave me another shrug, even more melodramatic than the first. “You are so anxious to be gone from Thasos?”

I knew what that meant, too. He wanted to know if soldiers or gendarmes or an outraged husband with a blood feud were on our trail. If he could soak us for more silver to make a quick getaway, he would. But he couldn’t, not this time. “No, by no means,” I said truthfully. I have paid for a quick getaway or two in my time, but not that day. Max and I were honest-or no one could prove we weren’t. I went on, “I just wanted to make sure you understood.”

His bushy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. “Understood what?”

“You’re going to be late.”

He didn’t laugh in my face, but the look on his said he was about to. Around a yawn whose studied insolence he must have spent a long time practicing, he asked, “And so?”

“Well, if you’re late, I’m afraid you’ll make my friend here very unhappy.” I nodded toward Max. He was standing extraordinarily straight, no doubt in relief from being doubled over belowdecks like a pair of trousers in a small carpetbag. It made him seem even taller than usual-an obelisk with ears, you might say.

The captain of the Keraunos looked him up and down and then up again. “And so?” he repeated-he had style, in a reptilian way.

Max drew his sword. The captain stiffened. So did I. Murdering the man before we set sail might get us talked about. But Max didn’t slice chunks off him, however richly he deserved it. Instead, he examined the blade and then took two steps over to the rail. He began carving strips from the wood. The strips were very long and very thin-so thin, you could almost see through them. They came off effortlessly, one after another.

The captain eyed them as they fluttered down to the deck one by one. So did several sailors. You could almost hear the wheels going round in their heads. Here was an uncommonly large man with an uncommonly sharp sword. If they were lucky, they might bring him down without getting hurt themselves. If they weren’t so lucky-which seemed a better bet-one or more of them would end up skewered. Shashlik, they say in that part of the world.

One of the sailors said something in Lokrian. I know what I would have said in his sandals. Assuming he had said it, I nodded pleasantly to the captain and spoke in Hassocki: “Yes, I think we ought to sail about now, too.”

He started to tell me something with a bit of flavor to it, but then his eyes went back to Max, who was still slicing strips from the rail. He seemed ready to cut right through it-or anything else that got in his way. The skipper coughed a couple of times, swallowing whatever he’d been about to say. What came out instead was, “Well, perhaps we should.”

I bowed. Always be polite after you’ve won. “Many thanks, kind sir. I knew when I first set eyes on you that you were a reasonable man.” Like anybody else, I defined a reasonable man as a man who does what I want.

When I first set eyes on the Keraunos’ weatherworker, what crossed my mind was, Be careful what you ask for-you may get it. Had he been a circus performer instead of a wizard, he would have worked for an outfit like Dooger and Cark’s. Since he was what he was, he sailed on the Keraunos. The captain of any better ship would have booted him off the stern. Man and tub, they deserved each other.

He might have been a good man once, or he might have been one of those dissolute wrecks whom trouble shadows even before they have fuzz on their upper lip. He’d been pickling in his own juices-and the ones he poured down-for a lot of years since then. The whites of his eyes were almost as yellow as the yolks of poached eggs. He swayed in the slight natural breeze as if it would blow him away. His hands shook so badly, he couldn’t light a cigar. One of the sailors finally did it for him. He puffed on the cheroot-a nasty weed flavored with anise (a Lokrian vice)-and then coughed like a dying consumptive.

At a gesture from the captain, another sailor fetched him a flask. He tilted his head back. The flask gurgled. So did his stomach, when the nasty stuff in the flask hit it. “Ahh!” he said-a pungent exclamation, because the rotgut was flavored with anise, too. His eyes crossed for a moment. But when they focused again, you had a better picture of the wizard he used to be. Then he took another pull at the flask, and you knew why he wasn’t that wizard any more.

The captain shouted to his crew as if there was no time to lose. And there probably wasn’t. They raced up the masts like monkeys. Could the weatherworker get us out of Thasos harbor while the popskull still fueled him and before it knocked him for a loop? We’d find out.

Down came the sails from the yards. The weatherworker gathered himself. He began the chant that would call the wind into the sails. To my surprise, the words were in Schlepsigian. That probably showed where he’d studied magic. Where he’d studied looking up at the bottom of an empty bottle, I can’t tell you. He’d got full marks in it, wherever it was.

For the moment, though, he stood precariously balanced between a hangover so devastating as to make any I’ve had seem a mild annoyance by comparison and drunkenness complete and absolute enough to make him forget his own name, or even that he had one.

“Poor bastard,” Max murmured, recognizing the signs. I nodded. No, it wasn’t hard to see how this weatherworker had wound up on the Thunderbolt.

For the moment, the balance held. I could feel the power flowing into him and then flowing out through him. When he pointed to the sails with a commanding gesture, his hands hardly trembled at all.

And that gesture, by what would serve for a miracle till a real one came along, did what it was supposed to do. A weatherworker operating alone can’t change much weather. One man-or woman-isn’t strong enough. It takes great teams of them for that, teams usually put together only in time of war. But one weatherworker can raise enough wind to fill a ship’s sails, and from a direction that will take the ship where the skipper wants to go.

At first flapping and then taut as the silk over a well-built woman’s bosom, the Keraunos’ sails filled with wind. The masts and yards creaked, taking up the strain. The weatherworker didn’t creak, but he was pretty plainly feeling the strain, too. He swigged from the flask yet again. That might help him for a little while now, but he-and maybe we as well-would pay for it later.

Still, later was later. For now, we began to move, in the beginning so slowly that I wasn’t even sure the motion was real, but then faster and faster. The quay disappeared behind us. The captain stood at the wheel, guiding the ship away from Thasos. The weatherworker kept on chanting. Our wind kept on blowing. The Keraunos’ sails kept on billowing. Thasos-indeed, dry land itself-faded and shrank in the distance.

“We’re on our way,” I said to Max. “We’re well and truly started.”

“Talk to me when we’re on our way out of Shqiperi with our heads still attached to our shoulders,” he said. “Then I’ll be impressed.”

If poetry were wine, there wouldn’t be enough in Max’s soul to sozzle a squirrel, and what there is has mostly soured to vinegar. He has his virtues, Max does, but his flights of fancy stubbornly refuse to grow feathers.

Thasos sits between two long, fingerlike, south-facing peninsulas that shield its harbor from most storms. By the time the weatherworker began to sway as if he were in a high breeze, we’d cleared them both. We were out in the open sea-or as open as the Mykonian Sea gets. It’s full of rocky, jagged islands, as if one of the ancient Lokrian gods had pissed out the ocean and passed a swarm of god-sized kidney stones while he was doing it.

Little fishing boats bobbed on the wine-dark water or scudded this way and that with their lateen sails. They went by the real breeze, the true breeze, and if it died they would lie becalmed. Fishing boats can’t afford weatherworkers. By all I can tell, most fishing boats can’t afford a bloody thing. Fishing has to be a harder way to make a living than performing in a circus, and I know of nothing worse I can say about it.

For a while, the Thunderbolt cracked along, all sails set, all sails full, the weatherworker raising enough wind to keep even Max from being too gloomy. It seemed too good to be true-and it was. The weatherworker had been gulping that anise-flavored swill every few minutes to fuel his wizardry. I don’t care how long you’ve been calcifying your liver; you can only do that for so long. And after a couple of hours of it, it was so long for him. He nodded in vague surprise, broke wind instead of raising it, and bonelessly crumpled to the deck.

The breeze died. I wished the weatherworker would die, too, but that was bound to be too much to hope for. The sails went as limp as a granddad’s try for a third round. The Keraunos stopped creaking and started crawling. Her skipper stirred the weatherworker with his foot. The man never moved. “Oh, thou hellbound, swinish sot,” the captain sighed in Hassocki: as resigned a curse as I’ve ever heard. Then he started shouting in Lokrian. His crew hopped to it; I will say that. They must have been through this many times before. They shortened sail and swung the yards to take what advantage they could of the world’s wind. But we were going to be late, late, late to Lakedaimon.