Every Inch a King

IV

Once upon a time, the Lokrians were the most civilized people in the world. All the history books insist on it. And if that isn’t proof we’ve made progress over the past couple of thousand years, Eliphalet curse me if I know what would be.

Scholars go on and on about the purity of ancient Lokrian sculpture, the magnificence of ancient Lokrian poetry, the innovation and insights of ancient Lokrian drama. For some reason or other, no one talks a whole lot about the ancient Lokrians themselves. And I’ll bet I know why: they must have been just as annoying and insufferable as modern Lokrians are.

That was what I was thinking when the Keraunos finally got into Lakedaimon most of a day later than the miserable ship should have. We sailed into the harbor in fine style. The weatherworker was working again. He’d come out of his stupor, and he’d had enough anise-flavored firewater afterwards to remind him life might still be worth living. In between his spells of consciousness, we’d had to make do with fitful true breezes, but did he care about that? Care? He didn’t even know!

Even now, Lakedaimon is a pretty town. The ruins on what they call Fortress Hill remind you of what a splendid place it was in the glory days of Lokris. Back then, of course, Lakedaimon tried to lord it over all its neighbors, and the other Lokrian city-states responded by trying to stick a stiletto in its back. Typical Lokrian politics, I fear. Two Lokrians will have three opinions and four faction fights. Lokrians will ally with an enemy’s enemy even if they know that fellow will turn on them as soon as he’s settled the first enemy’s hash. They think, Well, I lasted two days longer than he did and I got to gloat while he suffered, so who cares what happens next?

Charming people.

And they’ve always been like that. Take a look at ancient history if you don’t believe me. No, not the pretty stories-the history behind them. Yes, they held off the Sassanids all those years ago. Yes, they were heroes. Some of them were, anyhow. But an awful lot of city-states went over to the Great King. They fought on his side, and some of them were heroes, too. If he’d won, nobody would remember Lakedaimon.

When Lakedaimon fought Pallas for all those years, didn’t she have a couple of civil wars, too? Wouldn’t she have had a better chance of winning if she hadn’t hated herself worse than she hated her enemies? Seems that way to me.

One more. When the Aeneans conquered Lokris, how did they do it? Weren’t the Lokrians squabbling among themselves and with the Kingdom of Fyrom to the north? (The Lokrians claim the Fyromians were really Lokrian, too-just country cousins, you might say. These days, Fyrom is split among Lokris, Vlachia, and Plovdiv. Factions again, which argues that the Lokrians might be right.) Didn’t some Lokrians invite the Aeneans in to help their side? And didn’t the Aeneans pay them back by gobbling up all of Lokris one city-state at a time? If you look at it the right way, didn’t the Lokrians have it coming?

I asked our peerless skipper where the Quay of the Red-Figure Winecup was. He shrugged, which made the gilded fringe on his epaulets bounce up and down. I asked a couple of sailors who spoke Hassocki. One pointed east, the other west. It didn’t matter. The Halcyon was bound to have sailed. Since it was crewed by Lokrians, too, normally I would have assumed it was also running late. But that would have been convenient for us, so I didn’t believe it for a minute.

Then I asked the captain how to find the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. He gave me excellent, precise, detailed instructions. Somehow, I was less than astonished. If anyone was likely to know all there was to know about poxed trollops, our captain was the man.

“The Gamemeno isn’t supposed to go out for a while,” Max said. “You should ask him to recommend a hostel.”

I didn’t care for that. “No, thanks,” I said. “I want to go to a place where I won’t need a mage to kill bedbugs and fleas-and maybe crabs, too-afterwards.” I remembered the trollop one more time, and what might go with her.

We took our duffels off the Keraunos and got away from the misnamed ship as fast and as far as we could. Two large men-and Max is almost two large men all by himself-are safe enough by daylight almost anywhere. We waved down a cab. The hackman spoke some Narbonese. “Best hostel?” he said when I inquired. “The Narbo, without a doubt. But you pay there, sir-you pay.”

“What’s pretty good and costs a third as much?” was my next question.

We ended up at a place called Papa Ioannakis’. It was three blocks away from the Narbo. The big, fancy hostel blocked its view of Fortress Hill. But it was clean, it was comfortable, and you didn’t feel a vampire sinking its fangs into your purse and sucking out your silver.

The real Papa Ioannakis was a priest who fought the Hassocki and ended up dead before his time for his troubles. I neglected to point this out to Max. If he stayed ignorant of the fine points of Lokrian history-well, he did, that’s all. I preferred ignorance to babbling about evil omens, which is what I would have got if he knew that.

“Not bad,” I said, sprawling out on my bed.

“It would be better if we had some money coming in,” Max said.

“We’ve got enough.” Odds are I sounded irritable. I felt irritable. “If you want to go stand on a street corner and swallow your sword in front of an upside-down hat, go right ahead. I don’t feel like turning backflips just so I can buy myself an extra mug of wine-thanks all the same. If this goes off the way I hope it will, I’ll never have to turn another backflip as long as I live.”

“If this doesn’t go off the way you hope it will, you’ll never turn another backflip, either,” Max pointed out. “But you won’t live long.”

I didn’t argue with him. Life was too short. As a matter of fact, I wished that phrase hadn’t occurred to me so soon after his raven’s croak of doom. I wasn’t about to admit that, though, either to him or to myself. And I was glad all the way down to my toes that I hadn’t told him the story of Papa Ioannakis.

The hostel named for the late, lamented Lokrian priest had a pretty fair eatery across the lobby from the front desk. The waiter, a fussy little man in an ill-fitting formal jacket and a cravat that looked as if a strangler had knotted it, spoke enough Narbonese to get by. He beamed when we ordered local specialties: Max chose capon cooked with lemon, while I had grape leaves stuffed with ground lamb and rice. Mine were quite tasty, and Max turned his capon into bones fast enough to persuade me that he enjoyed his. The menu offered foreign dishes, too, but the native fare was half as expensive and probably twice as good. The cook knew what he was doing with it; he wasn’t trying to imitate some other kingdom’s style.

After a much better night than the two we’d spent aboard the Keraunos, we climbed Fortress Hill to look at the famous ruins there. Yes, it’s something everybody does. Yes, practically everybody we saw up there was from Schlepsig or the Dual Monarchy or Narbonensis or Albion. (The Lokrians take their ruins for granted. They’d have a lot more of them if they hadn’t torn some down to reuse the building stone.) But when were we going to be in Lakedaimon again? If the Two Prophets were kind, never.

And, even if everybody goes to see the ruins, there’s a good reason: They’re worth seeing. Take Cytherea’s temple, for instance. You can’t see the thirty-five-foot gold-and-ivory statue of the love goddess the Lakedaimonians put in it; one gang of barbarians or another stole it a long time ago. But the temple itself still is-and deserves to be-famous for its lines. You’ve all looked at woodcuts or those clever little spells that make a pair of pictures join together in your sight so you see not two pictures but one with real depth. Well, the difference between those and the real thing is about the same as the difference between a journal story about a pork-and-cabbage casserole and a big helping of the casserole itself.

Would you give a dog a woodcut of a bone?

The famous Lokrian sun and sky don’t translate well in descriptions, either. All I can tell you is they don’t make weather like that in Schlepsig, and I wish they did. It was warm without being sticky. The sky was a deeper, purer blue than my home kingdom ever knows. Up at the top of Fortress Hill, you thought you could see all the way to the edge of the world. Yes, I know the world hasn’t got an edge. You thought you could see it anyway.

Even Max was moved. He took off his hat, fanned himself with it, and said, “Nice view.” He really did.

And yet like I told you, you hardly see any Lokrians up there. Oh, they have a few guards, to keep you from sticking a temple in your hip pocket and taking it back to your hotel, but that’s about all. Wait-I take it back. There was also a Lokrian woman up there. Her lines were almost as fine as the temples’, and she dressed to emphasize them. Her eyes were dark as two sloes, but it was obvious she was fast.

“Is it that you speak Narbonese?” one of my fellow foreigners asked her, tipping his hat. After seeing so much marble, he was after something livelier.

He got it, too. She gave him a slow, sidelong smile. “Sir, my mouth will do anything you like,” she purred in the same language. After that, he couldn’t take her down off Fortress Hill fast enough. I only wished I’d spoken to her first. By the way Max’s eyes followed her, he was wishing the same thing. No, he wasn’t wishing that I’d spoken to her first… Oh, you know what I mean.

Now we both looked around for something of more recent vintage and softer curves than the famous stonework. We were out of luck, though. That miserable Narbonese seemed to have snagged the only woman of, ah, enterprise who’d gone up there that morning. No wonder we’re hereditary foes with Narbonensis, by Eliphalet’s whiskers.

Since Max and I had no pleasant excuse to go back to Papa Ioannakis’, we tramped every inch of Fortress Hill. I got a little piece of classical marble in my shoe, and had to park my fundament on a bigger one so I could take off the shoe and shake out the pebble. It fell to the ground with a tiny click-a bit of ancient history returning to anonymity.

Max, meanwhile, was peering down into the city. “Something’s going on down there,” he said.

“Well, so what?” I said. “Lakedaimon’s a fair-sized town. Why shouldn’t something be going on?”

“No, not something like that,” he said. “Something nasty.”

Now, Max’s imagination can turn a wedding parade into a funeral procession. I’ve seen him do it. Actually, it’s impressive, if you like that kind of thing. So before I believed him, I stood up and had a look for myself. Damned if he wasn’t right. When people start chasing one another through the streets with clubs and spears and crossbows, something’s come unglued somewhere.

Yes, we’d landed in Lakedaimon just in time for the Scriptural Riots. Thank you so much, Thunderbolt.

Everybody in the civilized world knows the Scriptures were first written in ancient Lokrian. Some sarcastic sage said a few years ago that the Goddess learned Lokrian just so She could write the Scriptures-and learned it very badly, too. But, while everybody knows this, nobody-nobody normal, I mean, leaving priests and sages out of the bargain-thinks about it more than once every five years, if that often. If you want to read the Scriptures, you read them in your own language. If you’re feeling especially holy and you’ve got more schooling than is good for you, you’ll look at them in Aenean.

But if you happen to be a Lokrian…If you happen to be a Lokrian, you read the Scriptures in ancient Lokrian. There’s only one problem with that. Modern Lokrian is closer to ancient Lokrian than Torinan, say, is to Aenean. But it’s not a whole lot closer. If you know modern Lokrian, you can sorta, kinda read the ancient language, with the accent on sorta, kinda.

So somebody got the bright idea of finally-Lokris kicked out the Hassocki a long lifetime ago-translating the Scriptures into modern Lokrian. And he published his book. On the day we were there, he published his miserable book. If we’d sailed away in the Halcyon, we never would have had to worry about it. If the Keraunos’ weatherworker’d been sober, we never would have had to worry about it. The weatherworker was drunk. We didn’t get to sail. We had to worry about it.

I have no idea whether this fellow’s translation was good, bad, or indifferent, mind you. I read even less Lokrian than I speak, and I don’t speak any. What I do know is that half the people in Lakedaimon seemed to think he was a hero, and the other half wanted to dip him in boiling butter-or, being Lokrians, possibly in olive oil instead.

I know all this now, you understand. I’ve pieced it together from journal articles and such. What I knew then was that way too many people in long skirts and short ones were running around assaulting one another with intent to maim, or maybe to dip in boiling butter. Somehow, I didn’t think they would refrain from mayhem on my person just because my clothes said I was no Lokrian. If anything, both factions might decide that kicking in a foreigner’s ribs was the one pleasure they had in common.

“How are we going to get back to the hostel?” Max asked. “They already seem pretty hostile down there.”

In lieu of braining him with a chunk of classical marble, I nodded. “Don’t they just?” I said. “I suggest we go…cautiously.”

“Good luck,” Max said. And we would need it. We were obvious foreigners. I’m a good-sized man, and I seem bigger next to Lokrians, who run short. Max is enormous next to anything this side of a temple steeple. The only way we could have made ourselves more conspicuous was by going naked. The idea did not appeal. We might have got by with it in ancient Lakedaimon, but not now, not now.

The idea of staying up on Fortress Hill didn’t appeal, either. Fortress Hill has some of the most glorious stonework in the world. And that’s all it has. No beds. No cafes. No nothing, unless you felt like chewing rocks. I didn’t. “Let’s try it,” I said. Max made a horrible face, but he didn’t say no.

We had no trouble going down the steps to the bottom of the hill. I knew why, too-the Lokrians didn’t feel like climbing them. There have to be more than there are at the Temple of Siwa, even if those are a lot steeper. But when we got to the bottom…The first thing we saw was a woman’s body. Someone had smashed in her head. Flies buzzed around the pool of blood. Max and I have both been through wars-but there wasn’t supposed to be a war here.

Fine. That poor woman got killed in peacetime. It didn’t make her any less dead.

My nostrils twitched. Then I coughed. You always smell a lot of smoke in a city, from cookfires and hearthfires and what have you. But you don’t get a gust of wind with smoke as thick as if you were smoking six pipes at once. “They’re trying to burn the place down,” Max observed. “That’s clever of them, isn’t it?”

“Brilliant,” I said. If the Hassocki had set fire to Lakedaimon, it would have been a fearsome atrocity. Everybody would have screamed and made them stop. Since the Lokrians were doing it to themselves, everybody would yawn-except for the people who got roasted. They’d scream, all right.

A band of a dozen or so rioters came tearing around a corner and started to rush right at us. They slowed down in a hurry, I must say. The sight of somebody Max’s size will do that to the most riotous rioter.

Max bowed to them. Since he’s so long and lean, he folds up amazingly. As he straightened to show them that, yes, he really was as tall as they thought he was, I bowed in turn. And I kept right on going, turning the bow into a handstand. If I’d been wearing a short skirt like most of the Lokrians, that might have played hob with my modesty. Or it might not-do they have drawers under those things? Trust me: I never tried to find out.

As things were, I had on ordinary civilized clothes: tunic, cravat, jacket, trousers. My hat fell off, but that was about it. I walked around on my hands, and waved to the Lokrians with one foot. If they were confused enough, I figured, they might go on leaving us alone.

After I’d stopped waving-and it isn’t easy to do if you’ve got shoes-Max grabbed my feet. We impersonated a drunken wheelbarrow and its even more pixilated operator. I’ve never played a drunken wheelbarrow before. Putting your shoulder to the wheel is hard when your shoulder is the wheel, or at least the brace that holds the wheel on. But what’s the point of performing if you can’t improvise?

As well as a drunken wheelbarrow could, I kept an eye on the Lokrians. I knew I might have to play an all too sober sprinter any moment now. Some of the rioters were really fricaseed. But the sozzled ones stared with the others. Whatever they’d expected, a street show wasn’t it.

After eight or ten of the longest heartbeats I’ve ever had, they decided they liked us. They crowded closer, laughing and clapping their hands. Some of them even tossed coins into my hat, which had landed crown down. I bet they thought I planned it that way. If I were as smart as that…If I were as smart as that, wouldn’t I have been on my way to Shqiperi?

Hang around Max for a while and he starts to rub off on you.

Because they liked us, we had to play our parts longer than we’d planned on-not that we’d done much in the way of planning. Max took some liberties with me that a real wheelbarrow would have slapped his face for. I would have slapped him myself, except our audience thought he was the funniest thing in the world, and they would have done worse than slap us if they hadn’t. The customer is always right, especially when he’s armed and dangerous.

At last, the wheelbarrow got rebellious and started kicking in the traces like a restive mule. One of those kicks almost made a mule out of Max-trifle with my dignity, would he? The crowd ate it up. I wiggled myself free of him and flipped to my feet, and we both took our bows.

Instead of mutilating us, the Lokrians pounded our backs, clasped our hands, and gave us nips of what had inflamed them. Not only that, when I picked up my hat I found we’d made damn near five leptas in silver. One of the rioters spoke fragments of Schlepsigian. When I made him understand we were staying at Papa Ioannakis’, he and his pals undertook to escort us back there.

The hostel was closed up tight, with shutters over the ground-floor windows and an enormous padlock on the front door. Riots are a fact of life in Lakedaimon. People get ready for them, the way they get ready for earthquakes. They do less damage that way.

A clerk came out on a second-story balcony. He shouted down at the crowd. They shouted up at him. So did I-he spoke Narbonese. He came down the fire escape to the first-floor balcony, then lowered a cast-iron stairway to the ground. Max and I went up the stairs. None of our riotous friends followed. I don’t know what the clerk told them-maybe that he’d turn them into prawns if they tried. He would have needed something interesting and memorable to keep them down on the sidewalk. Whatever it was, it worked.

As soon as we got up to the first balcony, he hauled up the fire escape after us. Only then did he allow himself a sigh of relief. Cadogan the lion-tamer would have been proud of him. He hadn’t shown fear in front of the wild animals. They’ll turn on you every time if you do.

“Thank you,” I told him.

“Not at all,” he answered politely. “We would lose our reputation if we lost our customers.” Around the corner, a woman screamed and kept on screaming. The hostel clerk winced. “This uproar, it is a misfortune.” In Narbonese, things don’t sound so bad as they really are. Max knows several languages, but that isn’t one of them. It doesn’t fit in with the way he thinks.

“A misfortune, yes.” I admired the understatement, and the cool way he brought it out. “What will you do about the, ah, uproar?”

“Myself? Try to stay safe. In aid of which, shall we go up?” The clerk led Max and me to the second-story balcony, and then in through the window to the room it adjoined. As he did, he went on, “My kingdom? My kingdom will wait till things subside, then catch a few ringleaders and plunderers and hang them. And after that?” He shrugged a resigned shrug. “After that, we shall start getting ready for the next time things turn-lively.”

I nodded to the stout middle-aged woman whose room that happened to be. Max gave her one of his deep and startling bows. Then we were out in the hall, for all the world as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And so it seemed-except even there the air smelled of smoke.

“Tonight’s supper specialty”-the clerk took a certain somber pride in making five full syllables out of that-“is lamb with garlic and rosemary. I trust you will find it to your liking.” He was working hard to pretend everything was normal, too.

“I’m sure we will,” I said, and I was-nothing wrong with Papa Ioannakis’ kitchens. But I couldn’t ignore the riots, however much I wanted to. For one thing, that poor woman was still screaming, loud enough for me to hear her in the hallway through a closed door (and, by now, probably a closed window, too). For another…“How long do you expect the, ah, uproar to last? We have a ship to catch in a couple of days.”

“As for the uproar, one never knows. It could peter out tonight, or it could go on for a week. Such is life.” He shrugged again. “As for the ship…Which is it, and from which quay does it sail?” When I told him, he did more than wince: He blanched. “The Quay of the Poxed Trollop? Sir, even without the disturbances you would do better to stay away. That is no place for honest men.”

In that case, Max and I were better suited to the quay than he suspected. With a shrug of my own, I said, “We have to get to Shqiperi, and that seems to be the fastest way.”

“To Shqiperi?” Lokrians don’t like Shqipetari. I mean, they really don’t like Shqipetari. I’d just put us beyond the pale. “On your heads be it-and it will.” The clerk stalked off.

“What was that all about?” Max asked. I didn’t much want to give him the gist, but I didn’t see what choice I had. After I translated, he gave me one of those looks you should only get from a wife. “You didn’t listen to me when I told you we were putting our heads on the block. Will you listen to him?”

“If I didn’t listen to you, why should I listen to some clerk at a hostel?”

“Because he knows what he’s talking about?” Max is full of uncouth and unlikely suggestions.

“If he knew what he was talking about, he’d have too much money to be a clerk at a hostel,” I said firmly. “In fact, if he says something like that, it’s a pretty good sign he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” My logic impressed me.

For some unaccountable reason, it failed to impress Max. “Hmm,” he said. “And just what do you know about the Shqipetari that makes you such an expert?”

“I know they need a king,” I answered. “And I know their king needs an aide-de-camp. Are you coming or aren’t you?”

“Oh, I’ll come,” he said, doleful as usual. “If I didn’t, you’d just drag somebody off the street-though where you’d find anyone this side of that Manolis fellow to fit into that captain’s uniform is beyond me.” He shook his head. “If you went and got someone who didn’t know you’re a maniac killed, I’d feel bad about it afterwards.”

“How about if I went and got myself killed?”

“Well, that, too-a little.”

The riots eased off before we had to go looking for the good ship Gamemeno. From everything I’ve learned since, this was more luck than design. The constabulary didn’t help much, because half of them were on one side and half on the other. And the King of Lokris didn’t dare call out the army, because half of it was on one side and half on the other. Like I say, Lokrians form factions the way Schlepsigians form drinking clubs, the only difference being that Schlepsigian drinking clubs don’t usually go after one another with cutlery.

So if the charming people of Lakedaimon wanted to go on murdering and raping and burning down chunks of their town, Eliphalet only knows what would have stopped them. Something else caught their fancy-a scandalous new dancer, I think it was-and they quit.

That clerk was on duty when we checked out. He rolled his eyes-partly, I suppose, at our getup. “I hope I don’t read about your case in one of our journals,” he said. I’ve had more encouraging good-byes. All things considered, it was lucky he and Max couldn’t talk to each other. They would have got on much too well.

Our getup…If the Quay of the Poxed Trollop was as charming a place as everybody said it was, we had two ways to approach it. We could try to blend in with the local lowlifes and seem invisible. Or we could be so gaudy and ostentatious that nobody-I dared hope-would presume to bother us.

Max blended in with the Lokrians the way oil blends with water. Come to that, I look about as much like a Lokrian as a camel looks like a unicorn-er, as a unicorn looks like a camel. You get the idea.

Since we couldn’t blend, we had gaudy forced on us. I put on my acrobat’s rig, while Max wore the Super Grand High Panjandrum’s uniform that was so much more effective in places where real generals didn’t dress like escapees from comic opera. The uniform did help us flag a cab. By the way the hackman bowed and scraped as he opened the door, he probably thought we were the Schlepsigian minister to Lokris and his military attachй. He was apologetic for knowing only a bit of Narbonese-that and Albionese are the foreign languages a Lokrian is most likely to speak.

“Quite all right, my good man,” I said in Narbonese, and he brightened. Then I told him, “Please be so kind as to take us to the Quay of the Poxed Trollop.”

Have you ever tossed a big chunk of ice into hot fat to congeal it on the instant? If you haven’t, you won’t understand what the hackman’s face did when I said that. “The…Quay of the Poxed Trollop, sir?” he wheezed. By the way he sounded, an invisible man was doing a pretty good job of strangling him.

“We have a ship to catch,” I said, wondering what kind of horrible scow the Gamemeno would turn out to be.

The hackman was thinking along the same lines. “A garbage barge?” he muttered. He slammed the door shut with what I thought quite unnecessary force, climbed up to his seat, and cracked the whip over the horse’s back. Springs creaking and big, iron-tired wheels clanging and bouncing over cobblestones, we set out.

Next to no one was on the sidewalk. Street traffic was drastically down, too. The riots had ended, but the locals feared they might pick up again any minute now. That was how it felt to me, too. When I said as much, Max looked at me and said, “I suppose you’ll tell me there’s a bright spot to all this, too.”

“Well, there may be,” I said. His expression could have frozen the ice to congeal the fat I was talking about before. “There may,” I insisted. “If anything will keep footpads at home beating their children, it’s the chance of getting caught in a riot.”

“You’re reaching,” Max said, and said no more.

Some of the people who were out and about didn’t have homes or flats any more. I say that partly because they looked as if they’d been wearing the same clothes for days-and they had-and partly because the cab rattled past the burnt-out ruins of quite a few homes and flats. Maybe the arsonists who started those fires hadn’t managed to turn all of Lakedaimon into a roasting pit, but nobody could say they hadn’t tried. The sour smell of old smoke hung in the air like an unwelcome guest who couldn’t figure out it was time to leave.

Shops had gone up in flames, too. Here and there, shopkeepers or hired guards patrolled the ruins to make sure nobody greedy went digging through the ashes. “The cradle of civilization,” Max remarked-and if that isn’t a judgment on a lot of things that have happened since the glory days of Lakedaimon, it will do till a nastier one comes along.

As we went down toward the waterfront, the neighborhood got worse. Back in ancient times, Lakedaimon’s port was a separate city. Nowadays, it’s just a slum. Even the good parts-like the quay from which the Halcyon had sailed-weren’t very good, and the bad parts were horrid. I would have taken the three gold globes for the harborside emblem if not for the profusion of wine jars and jugs of spirits over the taverns and the similar profusion of houses-if that’s the word I want-with red lanterns out front. It was the sort of place where cats didn’t eat rats. They got fat off protection money instead.

The hackman had the accursed gall to charge us three times as much for going from Papa Ioannakis’ to the harbor as the other fellow had charged for going from the harbor to the hostel. When I squawked, he suddenly stopped understanding Narbonese. “What’s going on?” Max asked. Wheep! Out came his sword, the way it had when Dooger and Cark tried to cheat us.

Maybe Wheep! is a word in Lokrian. Maybe the sight of the blade glittering in the famous Lokrian sunshine jogged the hackman’s memory. All of a sudden, Narbonese made sense to him again. So did the notion that he might-by unfortunate accident, of course-have tried to charge us too much. He was glad to accept the fare I proposed. He was even gladder to hop back up onto his cab and get out of there as fast as he could.

If I were a hackman, I would have been glad to get out of there, too. I don’t think Max noticed, but three or four men who, if they weren’t ruffians and robbers, could certainly have played them on the stage sidled towards us while I had my little…conversation with the driver. When his sword left the scabbard, they discovered they had business elsewhere. Coshing a very big man isn’t much harder than bopping anybody else over the head. Coshing a very big man who’s liable to run steel through your liver is a different sort of affair, one for which they had less appetite.

When Max started to sheath the sword, I set a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should leave that out,” I said. “It, ah, persuades people.”

He looked down at it, coughed, and shrugged. “However you like,” he said.

I didn’t like much about the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. I didn’t say anything about not liking it. We had to be where we were to get where we were going. That didn’t make it a garden spot. If I’d grumbled, though, think what Max would have said. I thought of it, and decided I didn’t want to hear it.

After the would-be highwaymen hit the highway (actually a foul-smelling, muddy alley where better than half the cobblestones were only memories), several poxed trollops came up to us. Well, I don’t know they were poxed, but the odds seemed good. Trollops they definitely were, in tawdry, tight-fitting finery and with painted faces more mercenary than any mercenary’s. They greeted us with endearments and obscenities-did they know the difference, or care?-in everything from Hassocki to Albionese.

I swept off my hat and bowed to them. After I nudged Max, he did the same. As always, his deep bow produced stares of astonishment, at least from the soiled doves who weren’t eyeing his crotch. Come to that, they looked more than a little astonished, too; the trousers on that ridiculous uniform fit snugly.

“My ladies,” I said (two lies in two words-can’t do much better than that), “can you tell me how to find the Gamemeno?” I stuck to Narbonese. More of them seemed to use it than any other, er, tongue.

Maybe I was wrong. The question sent them into gales of laughter. “Right here, pal,” one of them said, striking a pose that almost made my eyeballs catch fire.

“No, try me!” Another one twisted even more lewdly.

“Now what?” Max said, though he could scarcely have had much doubt.

I did. “I’m not quite sure,” I muttered, and went back to Narbonese: “The ship called the Gamemeno?”

“Oh, the ship,” the trulls chorused, and they giggled some more. That was when I found out what gamemeno means in Lokrian. Why anyone would want to call a ship that…Well, you find peculiar people everywhere. I used to know a Schlepsigian who named his sailboat the Rottweiler because he wrote doggerel aboard it. He had other troubles, too, believe me. One of the strumpets pointed down to the end of the quay. “That’s it.”

That was the only ship tied up at the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. I had feared that would be it and hoped that wouldn’t be. As usual, fear had more weight in the real world. The Gamemeno made the Keraunos look like a potentate’s pleasure yacht. If you’d ever seen the Keraunos, you would know how badly I just insulted the ship Max and I now approached.

A few sailors eyed us as we came up. You know the romantic tales of pirates on the high seas they used to tell? Well, forget them. These fellows looked like pirates, and like the sort of men who gave piracy a bad name in the first place. They hadn’t shaved. They hadn’t bathed. They looked at us the way a dog eyes the meat in a butcher’s window.

The gangplank was down. I went up it, Max right behind me. And I felt like a man who was walking the plank, too. Up close, the Gamemeno looked even grimmer, even more ill-cared-for, than she had at a distance. She took after her crew. By the look of them, someone should have taken after them-with a club.

“You sail for Shqiperi soon, is it not so?” I asked in Hassocki, the language I knew that I thought these cutthroats most likely to speak.

“Who wants to know?” asked the biggest and ugliest of them-a dubious distinction indeed. He wore the ugliest hat, too.

Before I could say anything, Max brandished his sword. Max was bigger than the sailor, though not uglier. He still had both ears, for instance. And he had a great load of righteous indignation in his voice as he exclaimed, “Have a care how you speak to the king!”

“The king?” The sailor-he turned out to be the captain-must have thought Max was a madman. Telling someone six feet eight with a sword in his hand that he’s a madman, however, requires that you be a madman yourself. What he did say was, “Why, thou most credulous fool, the Land of the Eagle has no king.”

“A horse’s cock up thine arse, thou loggerheaded and unpolished wretch, for assuredly it has one now,” Max replied. “Behold him!”

The fellow beheld me. If I seemed royal to him, he concealed it remarkably well. Laughing a laugh he’d surely bought secondhand from a carrion crow, he said, “He’s no more king than he can kick the hat off my head.”

Max bowed to me. “Your Majesty?”

I bowed to him. Then I walked up to the sailor, measured him with my eyes-he was an inch or two taller than I was-and bowed to him as well. “At your service,” I said-and threw myself into a backflip. When my feet were over my head, I kicked out with one of them, caught the brim of the hat without kicking him in the face (too bad!), and sent it flying to the filthy deck. I landed on both feet, straightened up, and bowed to him again. “At your service,” I repeated. “And you, I trust, at mine.”

He stared at me. He stared at Max. He stared at Max’s sword. And he stared at his disreputable hat. He picked it up and jammed it back down onto his equally disreputable head. “I don’t know what your game is, your Majesty”-he freighted that with enough irony to sink it-“but I’ll play along. Aye, we sail for Shqiperi. Would you honor us with your company?”

“I would,” I said grandly-even royally. And so I set forth for my kingdom.

V

I expected the Gamemeno to have a weatherworker who made the poor drunken blundering idiot aboard the Keraunos look like a genius of thaumaturgy. I wondered what would be wrong with him. Mere drunkenness didn’t seem nearly enough. Would he smoke hashish? Would he be haunted by a parrot’s ghost that sat on his shoulder, invisible except by the light of the full moon, and croaked words of evil omen into his unwashed ear? Would he decide he was a dolphin and had to swim in the sea instead of standing on the poop deck? Only a fluke, or the lack of two, would save us from being stuck with the world’s wind.

I turned out to be as right as a blizzard is black, which is one of the things we say in Schlepsig. They don’t know much about blizzards down in Lokris, though they do in the mountains of Shqiperi. To give myself what due I can, I realized I’d made a mistake as soon as I set eyes on this fellow. Except for being swarthy and sharp-featured, he reminded me of nothing so much as the officer candidates at the royal military academy in Donnerwetter. He was all business. I don’t think I’d ever seen a Lokrian who was all business before. I didn’t know such a breed existed.

He nodded to Max and me, said, “Good morning,” in perfect Schlepsigian, and started talking with the captain (whose name, I’d found out, was Tasos). Tasos might have been as snotty as a two-year-old with a cold to us, but he bent over backward (or maybe Lokrians bend over forward-I don’t know) to stay friendly with his weatherworker. Well, we were just passengers. He’d have to work with the other man again and again.

And there was more to it than that. I saw why pretty cursed quick, too. Speaking of cursed, Tasos swore in half a dozen languages when he ordered his bandits to cast off the lines that held the Gamemeno to the Quay of the Poxed Trollop and set sail. I understood most of the bad language. The Lokrian I had to figure out from what the sailors did.

As soon as the lines were coiled on deck and the sails unfurled, the weatherworker-his name, I learned a little later, was Stagiros-got down to that business of his. I thought the sailors had spread too much canvas, not just for the size of their tub but for the likely powers of their weatherworker. Well, shows what I know, doesn’t it?

Eliphalet and Zibeon, doesn’t it just! Stagiros summoned up a mighty wind, a wind that could have taken a Schlepsigian ship of the line into battle against Albion. The sails here didn’t sag and belly and slowly fill. No, not this time. They went taut all at once-boom!-and the Gamemeno left the Quay of the Poxed Trollop behind as fast as you’d want to leave a poxed trollop behind, or even a poxed trollop’s behind.

The pace we set! There were Lokrian Navy ships in Lakedaimon harbor, frigates and schooners and sloops built for speed. Naturally, those ships are going to have good weatherworkers aboard them, to get the most from their sleek lines. We showed ’em our probably poxed behind, and I mean with ease. The way things looked from our deck, somebody might have nailed them to the water. I’d never seen such weatherworking in my whole life.

What was a weatherworker like that doing on a ship like this? I couldn’t ask Tasos in quite those words, not unless I wanted him to pitch me over the side. So I asked, “How did you find such a fine man?” and pointed toward the busily incanting Stagiros.

“I paid him more than anyone else,” he answered without the least hesitation.

Was that sarcasm? I examined it up, down, and sideways, and decided it wasn’t. No, he meant every word, all right. This from a man who plainly clung limpetlike to every hemidemilepta he saw. Why?

More often than you’d think, asking the question makes the answer come. Why would Tasos and the Gamemeno want a weatherworker who had to be one of the best in the world? Because they needed to go from hither to yon and to get out of ports like a scalded cat? Why else would you want a weatherworker like that?

And why would you need to be able to run and scoot, to need it so badly that you had a first-rate man on a fifth-rate ship? I almost asked Tasos what he was smuggling, but that was a question I could ask myself, not one that would make me loved by our swashbuckling captain (ha!) and his jolly crew (ha! ha!).

I could legitimately notice we were sailing along to the southwest, not eastward as a lot of ships heading for Shqiperi from Lakedaimon would have done. “You care not for the canal?” I asked.

The Trans-Peninsular Canal is one of those places that almost have an ancient history behind them. The ancient Lokrians, not being blind, noticed that the secondary peninsula where a lot of them lived was connected to the rest of the much bigger Nekemte Peninsula only by a skinny little neck of land-a neck rather like that belonging to the present Hassockian Atabeg, as a matter of fact. They also noticed they would have themselves a demon of a shortcut if they cut through it.

One small problem: they couldn’t. That was partly because the project needed cooperation, and the Lokrians gave the world examples of how not to cooperate, as they did of so many other important things. And it was partly because the ancient Lokrians, while brilliant in any number of ways, were, when you get right down to it, pretty lousy wizards.

And so were the Aeneans. When it came to sorcery, as with most things, the Aeneans learned everything they didn’t know from the Lokrians. Even so, Emperor Otho had a crack at it. He assembled half the wizards in the Empire and about a quarter of the men who could carry a shovel, and they all converged on the little neck that separated the small peninsula from the bigger one. And they got started, and they went along for a couple of furlongs…

And Otho got bored.

Otho was good at getting bored. He was better at that than at most other things, though he did love his mother (which is another story, one you can look up for yourself). And so he went off and decided he was going to be a sprinter or a boxer or a god or whatever he felt like being instead of a fellow in charge of a canal. Or rather, part of a canal. A small part of a canal. The money stopped coming in. So did the food. The wizards went home. Some of the diggers did, too. Quite a few of them starved. Nobody knows just how many, because Otho was too bored to count them.

For almost the next two thousand years, nobody bothered with the canal. The Aeneans had tried and failed, so other people said it couldn’t be done. Then, about thirty years ago, a Narbonese company had a go of it with modern magery. They got about halfway and ran out of money. A Lokrian firm bought them out and finished the job. It took two modern companies twelve years to dig that canal, with proper wizardry to placate the local earth elementals and stabilize the bedrock elementals (the Aeneans had never even heard of, or from, them). No wonder Otho couldn’t hack it…through.

Tasos, I’m sure, cared as much for the history of the Trans-Peninsular Canal as he did for the history of the rutabaga. Whether he went through it or not was the only thing that mattered to him. “No, we will round Lokris instead,” he told me. “We have certain…stops to make along the way.”

“Uh-huh. I see,” I said. And I did. I wondered what he’d be loading and unloading at those stops. Spirits flavored with anise? Tobacco flavored with anise? Hemp flavored with anise? Wanted criminals? Criminals looking to do something wicked enough to make them wanted? A black wizard or two? Crossbow quarrels? Copies of the Scriptures done into modern Lokrian? Anything that was expensive but didn’t take up much room fit his bill just fine.

Like Max and me, for instance. Considering what he’d gouged us for a cabin to Fushe-Kuqe, we had to be at least as valuable as a few jugs of dragon spit. That was about how Tasos treated us, too-as cargo, I mean. As long as we didn’t rattle around and cause him extra work, we were fine. If we did…Well, that might not be so much fun.

I just stood by the rail and watched the land and sea flash by. Fishing boats that worked by the world’s wind bobbed in the water. Men with bushy eyebrows under short-brimmed black wool caps stared at us as we shot past. They were almost no sooner seen than gone. Stagiros really was amazing. Did he know how much he was worth? Could a shabby smuggler like Tasos possibly pay him that much? I found it hard to believe, but here he was.

The Gamemeno’s skipper posted a man at the bow to sing out warnings when we neared other vessels. Those fishing boats couldn’t move fast enough to get out of our way. Some of them, with their sails furled and with nets in the water, couldn’t move at all. We had to do the dodging.

As for Tasos himself, he kept a weather eye-I think that’s the proper seagoing phrase, isn’t it?-on the coast to our left. To port, I should say, shouldn’t I? “What are you looking for?” I asked innocently. “Pirates?”

He jerked. He twitched. He grabbed my arm. “Where?” he demanded. “What do you know? What have you heard?”

I didn’t know anything, not about pirates. I didn’t even suspect anything, and I certainly hadn’t heard anything. Well, no-all that wasn’t quite true. Now I knew one thing about pirates, anyway: our magnificent captain was scared green of them. “Why are you worrying?” I asked him. “With your wonderful weatherworker there, you can outrun any pirate ship ever hatched.”

“Would that Zibeon and Eliphalet gave me a pile of stones, of conformation like unto thy brainpan, that I might build me of them a rock garden in the courtyard of my home,” he sneered.

“Go to kennel, thou who wast born betwixt two stockfishes,” I replied. “Why revilest me so?”

“Should a fool not be reproved for his folly?” Tasos said. “We may outfly any pirate ship, aye. But catapult darts or stones? Fireballs? Arrows? Should one smite the weatherworker-” His hand twisted in a gesture designed to turn aside the evil omen.

“Oh.” I did feel the fool. If any of those misfortunes befell Stagiros, the Gamemeno was, well, gamemeno’d. I rallied as best I could: “Surely you will have another man aboard who can call the wind.”

“Surely I will. Surely I do,” Tasos said. “But, while many men can work the weather, how many can work it like Stagiros?” He spread his hands, waiting for my answer. I had no answer to give, and I knew it. Tasos’ second-best weatherworker wouldn’t match some pirate’s best. And so…he watched the jagged coast. Every time we darted past a headland or the valley where some stream came down to the sea, he muttered and played with worry beads while sweat ran down his face.

So much for honor among thieves. I wondered what a Lokrian Navy cutter would do if it came across the Gamemeno’s crew battling it out with cutlasses and crossbows and cantrips and counterspells against pirates. I know what I would have done if I were the skipper of a Lokrian Navy cutter. I would have laughed and closed my eyes and sailed away, hoping they slaughtered each other till not a man survived on either side. The more who fell, the better off the kingdom would be.

But I wasn’t a Lokrian Navy cutter captain. I was, Eliphalet help me, a passenger on this miserable Lokrian smuggler. And so, whenever we passed a headland or a little valley, I muttered while sweat ran down my face, too. I had no worry beads, but found I was able to worry quite well without them.

We put in for the night at a village called Skilitsi. I’ve looked for it since on a map. I’ve looked for it on several maps, as a matter of fact. As far as mapmakers know, it isn’t there. I wonder if the King of Lokris knows anybody lives in Skilitsi, or even that there is such a place. What you don’t know about, you can’t tax. The folk of Skilitsi struck me as being less than enthusiastic about contributing to their kingdom’s general welfare.

If you blink while you’re going by, you’ll miss the place. That’s what the people who live there have in mind. A big rock in the sea and groves of olives and almonds screen it off from the casual eye. If you don’t already know where it is, you won’t find it. And if you don’t, nobody in Skilitsi will care.

Tasos knew it. As soon as we skimmed between that big rock and the mainland, Stagiros let his wind die. The Gamemeno glided to a stop. Tasos shouted orders. The anchor splashed into the sea.

Rowboats approached from the shore. Tasos turned to Max and me. “Why don’t the two of you go below?” he said pleasantly. “What you don’t see, you can’t testify to, and no wizard can pull it out of you, either.”

It sounded like a polite request. It was a polite order. Tasos had several burly sailors behind him. None of them was as large as I am, let alone Max, but they made up in numbers what they lacked in beef. “I think we’ll go below,” I said, sounding cheerier than I felt. “Don’t you, Max?”

“Just what I always wanted to do,” Max agreed, as excited as if he’d got an invitation to his own funeral.

Down to our cabin we went. Belowdecks on the Gamemeno left all sorts of things to be desired. The ceilings weren’t tall enough for me, let alone poor Max. Several nasty odors filled the air. Some had to do with cooking, others with foul heads and unbathed men. Still others…I don’t know what all the Gamemeno was smuggling, but some of it smelled bad.

Poor Captain Tasos was a busy man. I didn’t want to upset him by reminding him that our cabin, while it didn’t have much, did boast a porthole. And, since we were on the right side of the ship (oh, fine, the starboard side, which happened to be the correct side, too), we could watch what was going on as well as if we’d stayed on deck. We could, and we did. Poor Captain Tasos.

It was a lot less exciting than one of Ilona’s tumbling routines, believe me. Lokrians rowed out from Skilitsi with crates and jugs and barrels. They rowed back with barrels and crates and jugs. I presume they sent the ship this and took away that, but I couldn’t prove it.

As it got darker, we had a harder time seeing what was going on. We would have quit if Tasos hadn’t wanted to keep us from watching. And how many times have you done something because somebody told you not to?

Oh, more than that. You must have.

For whatever it was worth, we finally got our reward. We saw something more interesting, or at least more unusual, than jugs and barrels and crates. I stared as a bigger boat than most came up to the Gamemeno. “Is that what I think it is?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. What do you think it is?”

“A coffin.”

“Well, it could be,” he said cryptically.

And it was. The obscenity and blasphemy from the deck came in eight or ten tongues, and would have fried the beards off both Prophets if they’d been alive to hear it. The oarsmen in that big rowboat added their fair share, too. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the corpse sat up and tossed in his hemilepta’s worth.

At last, once the shouting died down to aftershock levels, they rigged a block and tackle on deck and hauled the coffin up from the boat. Thud! It made a dreadfully final sound when it came down on the planking-right over our heads, by the sound of things.

Max cocked a wary eye at our ceiling, which went on creaking. “If that comes through-” he began.

I shrugged. “If it does, we’ll be too flat to worry about it.”

“You always did know how to relieve my mind,” he said.

We looked out the porthole again, but the coffin proved to be the grand finale. The boat that had brought it took back a load of illegal, immoral, untaxed…stuff. It grounded on the beach. The rowers unloaded it and dragged it ashore. No more boats came out.

Max closed the porthole. There were mosquitoes outside. As soon as he closed it, we discovered there were mosquitoes inside, too, but there were more of them outside. “So much for the exciting life of a smuggler,” he said. “It’s like watching grass dry.”

“Or paint grow,” I agreed. “What have we got for supper?”

He rummaged through his kit and pulled out what looked like a flexible billy club. “Mutton sausage.”

“Better than nothing,” I said, giving it the benefit of the doubt.

And it turned out to be quite a bit better than nothing. Say what you will about the Lokrians-and I’m one of their most sincere unadmirers-they do make good sausage: another tradition going back to the golden age of Lakedaimon, if you remember your comic poets.

Full darkness fell, fast as a drunk tumbling down a flight of stairs. Twilight lingers romantically in Schlepsig. The sky goes through every deepening shade of blue and purple toward black. Stars come out one by one. You can count them if you like, and you don’t have any trouble keeping up.

Nightfall in Lokris isn’t like that. The sun goes down. It gets dark, and wastes no time doing it. You look at the sky and you don’t see any stars. Ten minutes later, billions and billions of them are up there. Where were they hiding? How did they all come out at once? You can see more of them in Lokris than you can in Schlepsig, too. The air isn’t so misty-and, except when they’re having a riot, it isn’t so smoky, either. But I think our stars are more intriguing. You have to earn them. They aren’t just there, the way they are in Lokris.

You’d think the moon, seen through a porthole, would fill that round window with its round self. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. The moon looks so big hanging there in the sky, especially when it’s just rising or about to set. But if you hold a kram or a livre out at arm’s length between your thumb and forefinger, you can make the moon disappear behind it. I was surprised when I found that out. You will be, too. Well, actually, you won’t be, because now I’ve told you, but you would be if I hadn’t. Of course, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have tried such a silly thing in the first place, would you?

Up on deck, one of the sailors was-praying? I wished I understood Lokrian. But it might not have mattered here. With the porthole closed, the rhythm of his speech came through better than the actual words. I did think I heard Zibeon’s name a few times. That was…interesting. “A pious smuggler?” I murmured.

“Probably asking for blind customs inspectors,” Max said.

If I were a smuggler-and I have been, on a small scale, a time or three-I would ask for something like that, too. (And if customs inspectors aren’t blind, silver has been known to weight down their eyelids.) But a prayer like that is a businessman’s prayer, not one that comes from the heart or the belly. Somehow, the Lokrian sounded more as if he meant it. I don’t know the language, but the tone came through.

When I said so, Max only shrugged. “Maybe he’s slept with someone’s wife here. Or, since it’s Lokris, maybe he’s slept with someone’s husband. Do that and you’ll pray like you mean it.” He yawned. “Whatever he’s praying for, it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m nobody’s husband-and nobody’s wife, either. What I am is somebody who’s about to go to sleep.” He yawned again, wider than before.

We got out of our fancy duds, put on our nightshirts, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the short, narrow berths. Mine wasn’t big enough for me. Max’s was much too small for him. Most beds are. He has two choices. He can fold himself up like an inchworm or he can let big chunks of himself part company with the mattress. He twisted and wiggled. After a while, I heard a foot thump on the deck, so I knew he wasn’t imitating an inchworm tonight.

Along with being short and narrow, my mattress was lumpy. That was of a piece with everything else I’d seen on the Gamemeno-everything except Stagiros, who was in a class by himself. But I didn’t want to sleep on the weatherworker, or even with him. My tastes along those lines are boringly normal.

After some little while, I was able to keep my eyes closed without having their lids jump and twitch, the way a child’s will when he’s pretending to be asleep. Max still wiggled not far away, but I’d heard him do that before. I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of a barracks hall full of Hassocki soldiers who’d had a supper of beans. After that, one oversized sword-swallower with a cough wasn’t so much of a much. Before long, I stopped hearing him or anything else.

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when someone knocked on the cabin door. I did my best not to hear that, too; for a moment or two, I turned the noise into a dream about woodpeckers. One of them was pecking on my wooden leg, which would make better sense if I had a wooden leg. Like most circuses, Dooger and Cark’s has a wise woman who will take your money and tell you what your dreams mean. Ask yourself this: if she’s so wise, what’s she doing at Dooger and Cark’s? If you really need to find out about your dreams, pay a little more and go to a mage who might actually know.

Then the woodpecker said, “Otto? Wake up, you bloody bonehead!” I didn’t think a woodpecker ought to say something like that, even in a dream. Wouldn’t an angry woodpecker call me blockhead instead?

I opened my eyes. That wasn’t a woodpecker looming over me there in the darkness-that was Max, breathing sausage breath into my face. And somebody was knocking. I breathed back at him: “Do we ignore that, or do we open it and break something over the stinking whoreson’s head?”

“If I could have ignored it, I’d still be sleeping,” he said. If I could have ignored it, I’d still have had a woodpecker drumming on the wooden leg I don’t own. There are worse things, I suppose, but lots more better ones.

With a sigh, I got out of bed and advanced on the door. Some advance-it must have been a good pace and a half. Even on ships a lot fancier than the Gamemeno (which is to say, most of them), cabins are cramped. Ours there had more room than a coffin built for two-I had to be thinking about the one that came aboard a few hours earlier-but not much.

Even as I reached for the latch, the knocking stopped. Whoever was on the other side, he knew I was reaching. How did he know that? I opened the door, and I found out.

There he stood, in the narrow little passageway. He was perfect-but then, he would be. Ruffled shirt. Cravat. Tailcoat-he might have been about to sit down at the harpsichord. He might have been, but he wasn’t, because…Bloodless face. Red, glowing eyes. Oh, yes, and the obligatory fangs, too.

Vampire.

I should have known. So should Max. The Nekemte Peninsula has more undead than just about anywhere else. Vlachian vampires. Yagmar vampires (not Ilona, a warm-blooded wench if ever there was one). Dacian vampires, including the famous Petru the Piercer. Not so many Lokrian vampires. Lucky us.

Those terrible eyes grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. “May I come in?” he asked in some language I could understand-I didn’t so much hear his words as feel them in the middle of my head. They have to be invited in. They can’t cross the threshold unless they are.

“Yes,” Max and I breathed together. Under the spell of those glowing eyes, what else could we have said? Nothing at all. A vampire needs an invitation to come in, sure, but that doesn’t mean he won’t cheat to get one. “Yes,” we breathed again.

But the vampire didn’t come in. The light in his eyes went out. He gagged and hacked and coughed. If you’ve ever seen someone who’s never smoked before take an enormous puff on a strong cigar, you have some small idea of how the vampire acted. He fled down the corridor as fast as he could go, silent as the ghost of a cat. I wondered if he’d make it back to his coffin or fall over somewhere and lie there till the sun came up the next morning. I knew what I hoped.

I turned to Max at the same time as he was turning to me. We both started to laugh. Up in Schlepsig, we flavor lamb and mutton with mint. I think I said that once before. The Lokrians use garlic. The Lokrians use garlic, lots of garlic, in almost everything. They’d put garlic in apple strudel if they made apple strudel.

“Well,” I said, “shall we go back to bed?”

“Just a minute.” He rummaged in his wallet, took out some silver coins, and stuck them in the crack between the door and its frame.

“I thought silver kept werewolves away,” I said.

“It can’t hurt,” Max answered. “And how do you know this miserable scow isn’t smuggling werewolves, too?”

I scratched my head. He was right. I wouldn’t have put smuggling anything at all past Tasos. Just by way of example, he was smuggling the King of Shqiperi and his aide-de-camp into the Land of the Eagle, wasn’t he?

Maybe the silver worked. Maybe the vampire had just had a noseful of us. Either way, he didn’t bother us again. If he drained the rest of the crew dry-well, we’d have to figure out some other way to get to Shqiperi, that’s all.

When we came up on deck the next morning, we were chewing on more sausage-just in case, you might say. Captain Tasos seemed surprised to see us. Then he got a whiff of our breakfast, and he didn’t any more. “I trust you had a pleasant night?” he said, a certain gleam in his eye. After the vampire’s glowing gaze, Tasos’ gleam wasn’t anything special.

“You’re a trusting soul, then, aren’t you?” I pointed to the coffin. “Chain that up. Put roses and garlic on it. We want no more visits in the nighttime.”

“He is a paying passenger,” Tasos said. “He pays better than you do, in fact-he pays in gold.” So maybe there was something to Max’s silver coins after all.

Whether there was or not was something I could worry about later. “Whatever he’s paying, it’s not enough to let him suck the blood out of your live customers.”

Tasos stirred, as if he wasn’t so sure about that. Whatever he might have said, though, he didn’t. Max was wearing his sword. I wasn’t sure he’d ever sliced anything more dangerous than bread with it, but Tasos wasn’t sure he hadn’t. For an overgrown bread knife and theatrical prop, it was proving mighty persuasive.

“Chain it up till he gets where he’s going,” I repeated, and pointed to the coffin again. Then I took a step towards it. “If you don’t chain it up, I’ll open it. Why should you care? You’ve already got his passage money.”

Tasos tossed his head, where someone from another kingdom would have shaken it. “I don’t dare open it,” he said. “If I did, they would know, and they would have their revenge.”

He sounded as if vampires were some sort of secret society, like what they call Our Thing in Torino. He also sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. We don’t have vampires in Schlepsig, except for the few who’ve settled there to take advantage of the longer winter nights. We have werewolves and unicorns and trolls and dwarves and elves and gnomes and cobolds and all sorts of other wildunlife, but not vampires. I can’t say we feel the lack, either. Even though I’ve traveled around a good deal in kingdoms where they don’t live, I don’t know them the way somebody like Tasos would-he grew up with them, you might say.

“All right. If you won’t open it, you won’t. But chain it up and ward it,” I said, adding, “If you don’t, and if anything happens to me and my aide-de-camp, the Shqipetari will find out, and they’ll have their revenge.”

That was inspiration, nothing less. Tasos flinched. Lokrians think Shqipetari are passionate, faction-ridden feudists, bushwhackers and bandits and thieves, grifters and liars and cheats-pretty much what the rest of the world thinks of Lokrians. From everything I saw in Lokris, I’d say the rest of the world has a point. From everything I saw later in Shqiperi, I’d say the Lokrians have a point, too.

Max smiled his most sepulchral smile. “Would you rather have your throat punctured or just slit? Would you rather have your blood drunk or just spilled?”

“Zibeon!” Tasos muttered. I would have called on Eliphalet myself, but they’re both holy. Holy enough to ward against vampires? Of course, if you believe enough. But then, if you believe enough, almost anything turns holy.

He shouted for his crew. When they gathered, he harangued them in Lokrian. I don’t know just what he said. Whatever it was, it turned the trick. At first, they stared at him as if they couldn’t believe their ears. When they decided he meant it, they whooped. They hollered. They danced in a circle around the coffin. They kissed him on his stubbly cheek. Men do that a lot in the Nekemte Peninsula. I think it’s to keep the kissee from noticing the kisser is about to stick a knife in his back.

After the sailors finished celebrating, they went to work. I don’t know where they found so many chains aboard the Gamemeno. Maybe Tasos sold slaves when other business was slow. Maybe someone had peculiar tastes in bed. If so, his lady friend must have been an octopus. Otherwise, he never would have needed so many. Wherever the sailors found them, they used them.

And once they’d used them, they covered the coffin with so many roses and so much garlic, it looked like a collision between a florist’s and a Lokrian kitchen. The only thing missing was the olive oil. I’m sure the garlic came from the Gamemeno’s galley. The roses? I asked a sailor who spoke some Hassocki.

He looked at me as if I were even dumber than he’d thought, and he’d already pegged me for an idiot. “Thou hast not so much brain as ear-wax, plainly,” he said. “We brought them back from Skilitsi yesternight.”

They knew what they had on board, all right. I remembered the one sailor praying. Did they tell their passengers? It is to laugh. If we lived, all right. If we didn’t, well, Tasos had our fare, too.

Once the coffin was warded, the sailors swarmed into the rigging with higher spirits than I’d ever seen from them. Stagiros stood on the poop deck and whistled up the wind. The sails filled with wind faster than a politician on the stump. The Gamemeno left Skilitsi behind so fast, you almost forgot it was ever there. I’m sure the people who lived there were just as happy to keep it forgotten, too.

Off to the west, islands poked out of the sea. Some of them had little towns and fields and olive groves. You could live out your days in a place like that and never go more than ten miles from where you were born. Some people think that’s a life. Not me, by Eliphalet’s wind-whipped whiskers! Here I was, on a fast ship, heading for my kingdom!

I made the mistake of saying something along those lines to Max. One of his eyebrows acted as if he’d pulled on a string attached to his hairline. “Here you are, on a sneaking smuggler with a vampire’s coffin on the main deck, heading for a place where they’ll either assassinate you because you’re the king or execute you because you’re not.”

Some people haven’t got the right attitude.

I’ve tried explaining that to Max. He has an easier time swallowing cold iron than common sense. Arguing one more time seemed pointless. Instead, I reached up as far as I could, draped my arm around his shoulder, and crooned, “And here you are with me.”

“Well, someone has to do the worrying.” He shook me off like a unicorn whisking away flies.

Some of the islands out there on the blue, blue sea were too small or too dry to keep a town alive. They had goats, and a herdsman or two to keep track of them. You could live out your days in a place like that, too. It would make a hamlet on one of the bigger islands look like Lakedaimon, but you could do it. Not many of your goats would be much smarter than you were.

And some of the islands were just rocks like the one in front of Skilitsi, but farther out to sea. Maybe a tree or bush would find enough soil in a crack to take root. Maybe a pelican or a gull would perch and look out at the sea all around. Maybe the rock would be-a rock, grayish or golden, useless for anything except smashing a ship that didn’t see it soon enough in fog or storm.

Then there were the almost-islands, rocks that would have been islands if only they’d finished their suppers and drunk their milk when they were young instead of running out to play. They can’t quite poke their noses out of the water now, and they resent it. And they get even by using those noses to rip the guts out of ships that try to sail over them.

Thanks to Stagiros, we were going at quite a clip. I hoped Tasos knew exactly where we were. Discovering he didn’t might prove-embarrassing. The Gamemeno made a couple of small swerves. One was around a place where waves boiled even though you couldn’t see anything that would make them do it. The other stretch of sea looked ordinary enough, but he dodged it anyway. We didn’t hit anything. I approved of not hitting anything.

The wind of our passage ruffled my hair. I patted it back into place. As I did, I glanced back toward the coffin. If that wind was making my hair blow, what was it doing to the roses and garlic that helped hold the vampire inside? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t doing anything. The sailors had thought of that before I did. They’d stuck the stems and the strung-together cloves through the links of the chain. The wards against the vampire weren’t going anywhere at all.

Which I couldn’t say about us. The Gamemeno was as unsavory a ship as ever soiled the sea, but she didn’t waste any time. Whatever Tasos was paying Stagiros, he got his money’s worth. We hustled along. We would have hustled faster yet if we hadn’t stopped at small islands and in little hidden coves to unload this and take on that. Most of the time, I couldn’t tell what this and that were. Once, though, that was a pair of veritable Klephts.

Lokrians sing songs about Klephts. They think they’re romantic heroes-the ones who’ve never run into them, that is. Klepht means thief in Lokrian, which tells you more than you wanted to know about what Lokris is like. These two looked the part. They had fierce, hawklike faces-lines somewhat blurred by bushy beards-and wore big knives in their belts and bandoleers of crossbow quarrels crisscrossing their chests. I didn’t care to quarrel with them, with crossbows or without, even if they also had on those silly little skirts Lokrian men wear instead of pants.

They didn’t seem to want any part of us, either. That didn’t break my heart. Max’s sword could have had their cutlery for breakfast and still been hungry for spoons, which probably had a little something-just a little, mind you-to do with their restraint. They edged warily around the vampire’s coffin. They knew what it was, and they didn’t like it a bit. I wondered what they’d done to need to go somewhere else in such a tearing hurry.

Better not to know, maybe.

We’d just left the little inlet where we picked them up when a lookout screamed most sincerely and pointed out to sea. My gaze followed his finger. I felt like screaming, too. I’d never seen-I’d never imagined-a sea serpent that big.