Every Inch a King

IX

Yes, I was coming into my own. And, once I had come into it, I found it was my own…dump. Oh, the site is pleasant enough. Peshkepiia sits at the foot of the Dajti Mountains, near the edge of the most fertile plain in Shqiperi. It sits there, yes, rather like something your horse might leave behind.

Peshkepiia may boast ten thousand souls. Then again, it may not: an inauspicious beginning for a town aspiring to be the capital of the free and independent kingdom. To make up for its small size, it is very ugly. Most of the houses are one-story boxes of mud brick. The shops are built of mud brick and sticks and stones and whatever else the proprietor found to throw together and hope it would stand. The goods they sell are every bit as fine as the shops themselves.

The main street-Shqyri Berxholi, it’s called-is cobbled, quite badly. When I rode into town with Max and Essad Pasha and my retinue, we splashed through puddles nearly deep enough to drown our horses. A dead cat floated in one of them. Without a word, it said as much to me as that snooty beast back at Essad Pasha’s shooting box. And what it said was, What the demon are you doing here?

Peshkepiia does boast one four-domed fane to the Quadrate God that is said to be rather fine. I suppose it is. Still, to anyone used to the sky-leaping grandeur of temples dedicated to the Two Prophets, any fane belonging to the Quadrate God will seem…well, squashed. I shouldn’t complain about this one, though, not when I was crowned in it.

But, as the writers of cliffhanger stories are fond of saying, I anticipate.

When I rode in, Peshkepiia gave me a typical Shqipetari greeting. It yawned. Of course, what it saw was a troop of Hassocki horsemen riding in-only that and nothing more. Hassocki horsemen Peshkepiia was used to. A large fort with thick walls of dun mud brick stood across the square from the Quadrate God’s fane. Hassocki sentries paced along the top of the wall.

I’ve seen sentries pace where pacing is just routine. I’ve been a sentry on that kind of duty. You might as well be asleep. Even though you walk their beat, anybody could sneak past you. Not these fellows. They were on their toes. They knew that for half a counterfeit copper some Shqipetar would knock them over the head and steal everything they owned, right down to their bootlaces.

If Essad Pasha thought he was going to stow me in that fortress till he plopped a crown on my head, he would have to do some fresh thinking. I’d spent more time in Hassocki fortresses than I ever wanted to. Amazing what a hungry man will do to keep eating, isn’t it?

But I was spared that quarrel, anyhow. He took me to the Metropolis, purportedly a hostel. In any town in Schlepsig, the Municipal Board of Health would close the place at once. In Thasos or Lakedaimon, it would be a dreadful dump. In Peshkepiia, it’s the fanciest place in town. For all I know, it might be the only place in town.

“You will want to make the acquaintance of the diplomatic community, eh, your Highness?” Essad Pasha said.

I was surprised he thought I would want to do any such thing. I was even more surprised to learn there was a diplomatic community in Peshkepiia. Service in Shqiperi has to be the diplomatic world’s equivalent of performing in Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels. Since I’d been doing exactly that, I decided these so-called diplomats deserved me. After I met them, I wondered what I’d done to deserve them. But, again, I anticipate.

At the time, all I said was, “I’d be happy to, your Excellency.” As happy as a blizzard is black-you can use that proverb several ways.

Max looked back over his shoulder. “By-the four directions”-a hasty save; he must have barely swallowed something like, By Eliphalet’s beard-“we’ve been followed.”

I looked back over my shoulder, too, with a certain amount of apprehension. There have been times in my life when hearing a sentence like that would send me diving headlong out the nearest window. There have been times when hearing a sentence like that did send me diving out a window-and a good thing, too. I needed a moment to realize nobody in Shqiperi knew me well enough to follow me for reasons like that. It had to be something much less important.

It was the pack of scribes from Fushe-Kuqe, which proved me right.

Bob the Albionese called out, “How does it feel, now that the crown of Shqiperi is about to descend on your head?” I’d never heard anyone this side of Max make a coronation sound so much like an execution. Bob called out the question in Albionese, forgetting I was pretending not to speak that language.

Fortunately, I didn’t forget I was pretending. “What does he say?” I asked in Schlepsigian. “Maybe I will be able to understand him better once he gets his hair on straight.”

The other journalistic jackals smiled. Some of them snickered. A man with an ill-fitting toupee should not ride hard. Beneath that disarrayed mop of improbably black hair gleamed a wide expanse of improbably pink scalp. Bob himself was blissfully unaware he’d come undone, which only made it sweeter. I had the feeling Bob was blissfully unaware of quite a few things.

Someone translated his foolish question into Schlepsigian, which I admitted to speaking-I spoke it like a native, in fact. It didn’t sound any less foolish than it had before. “It feels good,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have come to Shqiperi if I didn’t want to go through with this coronation ceremony.”

That should have been obvious. But nothing is obvious to scribes. If things were obvious to them, they would have chosen a different line of work.

When my reply was rendered into Albionese, Bob asked (still in that language), “What will you do after you are coronated?”

Yes, he said that, in his own allegedly native tongue. It was, I suppose, logical, as scribes reckon logic. What happens at a coronation ceremony? Why, someone is coronated, of course. Someone is, I should say, if you don’t bother to think before you open your mouth.

However much I felt like crowning Bob-Albionese can be a noble tongue when spoken well-I couldn’t even react till somebody turned his foolishness into Schlepsigian. The translation actually made sense. Any time a translation improves things, you have a pretty good notion how bad the original is.

“What will I do? The best I can,” I answered; I wasn’t quite so foolish as Bob, but I did seem to be making an effort.

“What will your policy be toward Vlachia and Belagora?” another scribe asked.

I looked out at the swarm of them. “Why are you asking me the same questions you asked me in Fushe-Kuqe?”

“Because you’re in Peshkepiia now,” they chorused. The frightening thing was, they meant it.

“Well, I hope to be in the bathtub soon,” I said. “I probably won’t change my mind between now and then, but I promise you’ll be the first to know if I do.”

Essad Pasha smiled; he enjoyed irony, especially when the sharp iron in it wasn’t piercing him. Max coughed, which could have meant anything. And the scribes, both Prophets pray for them, wrote it down.

“To the bathtub,” I told Essad Pasha.

“If the place has one,” Max said.

There was a cheery thought. “We’ll find out,” I said.

We found out. The Metropolis didn’t have a bathtub. The Metropolis, for that matter, didn’t even have a lobby. When we walked inside, we walked into the dining room-and into what seemed like a street fight. Waiters were screaming at one another in Shqipetari. When people start screaming in Shqipetari, you always have the feeling knives will come out any minute. Most of the time, you’re right.

A fat man with an enormous mustache was screaming at a customer in Narbonese. The customer was screaming back in Schlepsigian. That by itself might have been enough to make knives come out. Narbonensis keeps trying to strangle Schlepsig’s legitimate political and territorial aspirations. Any good Schlepsigian patriot will tell you the same. Ignore Narbonese fanatics’ lies.

A little farther back, behind a low counter that could double as a breastwork, the cooks were screaming, too. They already had knives out. They also had serving forks big enough to skewer Max, red-hot frying pans full of sizzling oil, and, if all else failed, burning brands from their cookfires. I rather hoped they would start throwing those around. Burning down the Metropolis would have been the best thing that could happen to it.

For some little while, everyone was so busy shrieking at everyone else, nobody bothered to notice us. I began to feel affronted-when would we get our fair share of abuse? Well, we didn’t have long to wait. The fat man must have got tired of screaming in Narbonese, for he came over to us and started screaming at me in Hassocki: “Who art thou, who pollutest the peace with thy presence?”

“I am thy king, thou roasted ox with a pudding in thy belly!” I roared into his startled face. “Down on thy knees, wretch, and see if thou hast the strength to rise again thereafter.”

He did go down on his knees, and got up brushing at his breeches. Among the other amenities the Metropolis lacked was any flooring fancier than rammed earth. When he arose, he was a different man: one who might possibly know something about keeping a hostel. “Oh, yeah-heard you were coming,” he said, his voice casual if still much too loud. “I’m Hoxha. I run this joint.”

Somebody yelled at his broad back in Torinan. He answered hotly in the same tongue. By all appearances, a hosteler in Peshkepiia must be able to revile anyone in any language at any time. In that respect, at least, Hoxha seemed perfectly suited to his job.

“Could I trouble you to take me to my room, please, and to get me some hot water for washing?” I asked. I didn’t bother inquiring if the Metropolis boasted running water. The smell of sewage in Peshkepiia told me the only running water in town lived in the belly of a running man.

Hoxha went right on yelling abuse in Torinan. I might have disappeared. Something told me politeness won few friends in Shqiperi.

Very well, then: the direct approach. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him back toward me. “Thou poxed and scrofulous knave!” I screamed at him from a distance of perhaps two inches. “Thou unlicked whelp of a rabid jackal bitch! A room! Hot water! Or thy head answers for it!”

“All right already,” he said, as if I’d asked him the way I had the first time. Then he yelled, “Enver!” Enver looked like Hoxha back in the days when Hoxha was half as old and half as wide. Hoxha crackled out something in Shqipetari. Since I don’t speak Shqipetari, I can’t prove it was inflammatory, but I wouldn’t have wanted anybody saying anything that sounded like that to me.

Enver took it in stride. He’d surely heard worse. “You come with me please, your Highness,” he said in passable Hassocki.

Before I could, the Schlepsigian gentleman who’d been shouting at Hoxha came over to me. So did another man, a dapper, clean-shaven fellow with a hairline black mustache: surely a Narbonese. They eyed each other with perfect mutual loathing. The Narbonese spoke first; Narbonese, in my experience, generally speak first. In nasally accented Hassocki, he said, “Your Highness, I am Sous-vicomte Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland.” He had more names and titles than ruffles on his shirt, which is saying something. “I have the distinct honor and high privilege to be the Kingdom of Narbonensis’ commissioner in Shqiperi. I look forward with great eagerness to your coronation.”

Of course he did. There would be a feast afterwards, to which he would be invited. And he would be able to write a report that said something besides, Sat here today gathering dust again. Please let me come home! Whatever I did, I promise not to do it again-or if I do, I promise not to get caught.

I gave him my second-best bow. “Honored to meet you, your Excellency.” I extended my hand. He took it. A corpse has a limper handclasp, but not much.

When Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland started to say something more (as Narbonese will, and will, and will), the Schlepsigian who’d been waiting there with exemplary patience got leave to speak with an expedient elbow to the pit of the sous-vicomte’s stomach. Clicking his heels, he said, “Hail victory! I am told you speak Schlepsigian, your Highness,” in his own language, which also happened to be mine.

I nodded. “I do,” I said.

“Good. Then we will continue to use it,” he declared, with the decisiveness typical of our countrymen. “I am Untergraf Horst-Gustav of Wolfram, the mighty King of Schlepsig’s representative to this…place. I present myself.” He bowed stiffly from the waist and clicked his heels again.

“Honored, Your Excellency,” I said. With Schlepsigian exuberance, Horst-Gustav tried to crush my hand.

“You will please note, Your Highness, that the Schlepsigian son of a sow is too ignorant to speak Hassocki,” Jean-Pierre-Jacques-Roland said. “You will also notice that the mighty King of Schlepsig did not think it worthwhile to send a man here who understood either Hassocki or Shqipetari.” To show he spoke the latter, he said something to Hoxha. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone saying anything that sounded like that to me. By the gesture the gracious hosteler used, he didn’t want anyone saying it to him, either.

Untergraf Horst-Gustav’s scarred face reddened as the Narbonese and I conversed in a language he couldn’t follow-the sous-vicomte was right about that. “We must make alliance, Schlepsig and Shqiperi,” he burst out in Schlepsigian. “Each of our kingdoms will gain room to live and will take its natural place in the sun.”

“When a Schlepsigian says he will take his natural place in the sun, he means he will take yours, too, and then blame you for mislaying it.” Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland wasn’t shy about slandering my birth-kingdom.

Horst-Gustav looked more and more worried that all this talk in what he thought was my native tongue would seduce me. Had it really been my native tongue, he might even have been right. “Narbonensis is Vlachia’s patron!” he burst out. “The Vlachs in Vlachia and Belagora oppress Shqipetari every chance they get. You can never trust Narbonensis-never!”

Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland yawned. “This man does not speak. He merely breaks wind with his mouth.”

The King of Schlepsig’s representative really didn’t know any Hassocki, or he would have broken the Narbonese commissioner in half. “I should like to rest and to bathe,” I said. “Matters of state can wait until I wear the crown. Enver, please take me to my room.” Hoxha’s probable son seemed not to hear me. “Enver!” I shrieked, and that got his notice.

Another man came into the dining room at the same time as Max and I were leaving. He had slicked-back hair, a mustache waxed into spikes, and a shirtfront covered with enough medals to make a pretty fair set of scalemail. As soon as I saw that blinding refulgence, I knew he had to come from the Dual Monarchy. They pin a medal for steadfastness on you if you get out of bed on time three days running, a medal for valor on you if you swat a fly, and a medal for heroism on you if you cut yourself shaving.

What with all the brasswork and glass paste and ribbons on the fellow’s chest, I almost didn’t notice that he had the coldest gray eyes I’ve ever seen. He looked at me as if he’d just found me on the sole of his patent leather boot: yes, a man of the Dual Monarchy, sure as sure.

“Take no notice of Count Rappaport, your Highness,” Essad Pasha said. “You may rest assured no one else does.”

But that wasn’t quite true. When Count Rappaport shouted at Hoxha, he, like Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland, shouted at him in Shqipetari. And the hosteler, though he shouted back, didn’t scream back, which, I thought, betokened a certain unusual respect.

“Your room, your Highness,” Enver said after we’d walked down the hall a bit.

It had a door with enough bars and locks and bolts to keep out a horde of invading Kalmuks. Of course, there were no Kalmuks for several hundred miles; they’ve finally been bundled back onto the steppes of Tver, and a good thing, too, says I. Whether the door would keep out your average, ordinary, everyday burglar was liable to be a different question.

Enver had enough keys on his belt to make a pretty fair pianoforte. He used six or eight of them, and had another in his hand when the door swung open, seemingly of its own accord. He sidestepped smartly so it didn’t clout him in the head, and turned the sidestep into a gesture of invitation. Enver would go far, probably with the gendarmerie in hot pursuit.

Before stepping in, I held out my hand. He set those six or eight keys in my hand. When Max coughed and dropped his own large hand to the hilt of his sword, Enver added the key he’d been about to use. That struck me as a good idea. You never could tell.

Oh, yes. The room. Well, it had that door, a window with stout iron bars across it, four walls, and a ceiling. It also had the same rammed-earth floor as the dining room, though a profusion of brightly patterned Hassocki rugs and cushions covered most of it. Hoxha no doubt saved on furniture that way. Since I was playing a Hassocki-style prince, however, I could scarcely object to Hassocki-style quarters.

The only non-Hassocki article in plain sight was the homely thunder-mug in one corner. That, like most such from Caledonia to Vyzance and beyond, was of Albionese manufacture. One family has made what must be a sizable fortune from our earthiest needs, and tied its name to them forever. Or haven’t you used a Chambers pot any time lately?

“I hope all is well.” Enver turned to go.

“Hot water and towels,” I said. When he took a step away from me without replying, I seized an arm to prevent his escape and bellowed in his ear: “Hot water and towels!” I was learning.

“Just as you say, your Highness,” he promised, and I let him go. He took it in good part. That is simply how people do business in Peshkepiia. Imagine the most charming characteristics of Lokrians and Torinans blended together. Now make everyone carry knives-and swords, and crossbows-and revel in using them.

Now multiply by a dozen or two. You commence to have the beginning of a start of an inkling of a notion of what Shqiperi is like. My very own kingdom!

“I shall leave you to your own devices here for the time being, your Highness,” Essad Pasha said. “Towards evening, I shall escort you to the fortress for a reception, and the coronation ceremony should be tomorrow.”

It had better be tomorrow, I thought. But the best way to hatch anxiety in others is to show you feel it yourself. Ask a lion-tamer if you don’t believe me, not that you’re likely to be able to ask a lion-tamer who let his beasts know he was nervous. I inclined my head to Essad Pasha: regally, I hoped. “Until evening, then, your Excellency,” I said.

Essad bowed and took his leave. A moment later, two elderly attendants came into the room. One carried an enormous cotton Hassocki towel-large enough for an ancient Aenean to have wrapped himself in it for a mantle. The other bore a tiny basin of water ever so slightly warmer than its surroundings.

“More water. Hotter water,” I told him in Hassocki. He looked blank. I tried Schlepsigian. Nothing. I didn’t want to admit to speaking any other tongues, and the attendant probably wouldn’t, either. So I turned to Max and said, “Captain Yildirim?”

By Eliphalet’s holy toenails, the sweet wheep! of Max’s sword leaving its scabbard was a sound I was coming to know and trust, a sound that promised all in the world would soon be made right. The world is sometimes a peculiar place, I grant. Had Max not been the putative aide-de-camp to a putative sovereign and crowned head, that wheep! would have been the sound of a man about to be arrested for assault with intent to maim. But things are as they are, not as they might be, so I smiled when the sword sprang free. I felt confident good things were about to happen, and they did.

“Thou!” Max snarled at the water-bearer. “Thou shalt fetch us more of thy stock in trade, and quickly, lest we use it to seethe thy worthless bones for stew!” He rounded on the other gray-mustached lout, the one with the towel. “Thy partner in sloth shall be hostage against thy speedy return.”

“’Twill do you no good, for he likes me not,” the towel-bearer said, apparently despairing of his life.

“Thou speakest our tongue!” I exclaimed. The towel-bearer bit his lip in shame and mortification; this was something he should never have admitted, yet fear of death unmans the best of us. I went on, “Put our words into Shqipetari, then. Tell thine accomplice and partner in crime what we require of him.”

He spoke in Shqipetari. The water-bearer replied volubly, and with considerable warmth. Giving a guest in the hostel what he actually wanted and required must have violated some basic Shqipetari commandment. Sometimes, though, there is no help for a situation. With a sigh that spoke volumes about the abomination he was committing, the water-bearer withdrew, to return only a little more slowly than he should have with only a little less water than we needed, water only a little less hot than it might have been.

Having done so, he hung about with an expectant look on his face. “How now?” I inquired, hoping against hope that…

But no. “My tip?” he said in perfectly intelligible Hassocki.

“Oh, of course,” I told him, and turned to Max. “Captain Yildirim, if you would be so kind…?”

The water-bearer left in some haste after that, so he didn’t get the tip of Max’s sword after all. Too bad. Not even a king, I discovered, can have everything he wants all the time: in the confusion, the towel-bearer also made good his escape.

“Well,” I said, “let’s wash.” And we did.

Evening approached. Someone knocked on the door. When I opened it, Essad Pasha stood in the hallway, his uniform almost gaudy enough to have come from the Dual Monarchy. “Your Highness.” He gave me a most proper bow.

“Your Excellency.” I returned it, not quite so deeply.

“I hear from the good Hoxha that you have shown yourself to be every bit as, ah, masterful here as you, ah, did in Fushe-Kuqe,” he said.

“The good Hoxha?” I raised an eyebrow. “The only man by that name I know is the villain who runs this hostel.”

Essad Pasha wheezed laughter. “North and south, east and west, you will find worse,” he said, which was probably true. “Will you accompany me to the reception in your honor?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I replied. The last reception in my honor I remembered was arranged by the father of a nicely curved little blond girl I’d been seeing. That one involved a horsewhip, among other tokens of his esteem. I hoped this occasion would prove more, ah, festive.

When we first left the Metropolis, I must confess I wondered. In Peshkepiia, evening is the time when the flies go in and the mosquitoes come out. Now, I have met a good many mosquitoes in a good many miserable places. Shqipetari mosquitoes, however, are in a class by themselves. I think some of their grandmothers must have cavorted with the dragons of the mountain peaks. If they didn’t breathe fire when they bit, it wasn’t from lack of effort.

Max must have been thinking the same thing I was-rather an alarming notion most of the time-for he said, “I wish I had a teeny-tiny crossbow.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he slapped at the back of his neck.

I did some slapping of my own, then wiped the palm of my hand on my trouser leg. “It wouldn’t help,” I said mournfully. “They can bite faster than you can reload.” The buzzes and whines all around us were nearly as frightening as those from near misses by crossbow bolts.

Essad Pasha stolidly stumped along ahead of us. The mosquitoes didn’t seem to bother him at all. At the time, I put this down to professional courtesy. Now I wonder if the odor of camphor that wafted from him might not have had something to do with it.

Most Shqipetari were off the streets and out of the square. Whatever their flaws, they had sense enough to stay behind netting after it got dark. As for me, I’d set out from the hostel a prince, but I wondered if I’d get to the fortress as anything more than a perambulating lump of raw, bloody meat.

Torches blazed by the entrance. Hassocki sentries came to stiff attention as we approached. “Your Excellency!” they called to Essad Pasha. “Your Highness!” they called to me. They didn’t call anything to Max, but their staring eyes took his measure-and quite a lot of it there was to take, too. As befit a prince’s aide-de-camp, he looked through them rather than at them.

They smelled of camphor, too. That might explain how they could stand out there without being reduced to boots and uniforms by the time the morning came. Something had to. Otherwise Essad Pasha would have used up an uncommon number of sentries, enough for the duty to have become even less popular than it usually is.

“This way, your Highness,” Essad Pasha said, pointing toward the only brightly lit building inside the fortress. I think-I hope-I would have figured out all by myself that that was where the reception would take place, but Essad Pasha counted on no man’s intelligence but his own.

We passed through seven veils on our way into the reception hall. Some mosquitoes passed through them with us, but not too many. Inside, people could mostly talk without leaping into the air with a curse or rubbing their ears as if those had begun to ring. Mostly.

“I have the high honor and distinct privilege,” Essad Pasha said in a booming voice, “of presenting his Highness, Prince Halim Eddin of the Hassockian Empire, soon to become his Majesty, King Halim Eddin of Shqiperi. Long may he reign!”

I took a bow. I don’t know how else to describe it. Everyone applauded-well, almost everyone. Count Rappaport sent me another of his cold gray stares. The Dual Monarchy does like to dress its functionaries in comic-opera uniforms. They often have comic-opera manners, too, bowing and smirking till you’re tempted to think they couldn’t possibly conceal a working brain anywhere about their person. This is a mistake, as the other Powers have often found to their sorrow.

With so many people cheering me, though, I could afford to ignore the iron-faced count-or so I thought, anyhow. Afford it or not, ignore him I did. And so did Essad Pasha, who waved for the small band in one corner of the room to strike up a sprightly tune.

Over the years, I’ve grown used to Hassocki music. To those accustomed to the styles of Schlepsig and Torino-or even to those of Narbonensis and Albion-Hassocki music sounds like what happens when you throw two cats, a chicken with a head cold, and a small, yappy dog into a sack, tumble the sack down a flight of stairs, and then set it on fire. As a matter of fact, it sounds that way to me, too. But I’ve learned to distinguish the notes each tormented animal-er, musician-makes, if not always to appreciate them.

This, however, was Hassocki music as played by Shqipetari-I suppose in honor of my impending coronation. Far more than Count Rappaport’s menacing gaze, it made me wonder just how big a mistake I’d made in coming here. I had never heard sounds like that before; nor, except once when a crowded coach overturned on an icy road, have I since.

One of the song butchers thumped irregularly on a drum. One sawed and scraped at a fiddle. One plucked away on what might have been a lute if it hadn’t had too many strings and too long a neck-it looked like a lute the way a camel looks like a horse, in other words. And if the mustachioed villain cradling it in his lap had been plucking a camel instead, more melodious noises might have emerged from it.

A small chorus accompanied the alleged instrumentalists. The men’s voices were too high. The women’s voices, on the other hand, were too low. No two of them seemed to my untrained and startled ear to be perpetrating the same tune at the same time. Each one was trying to out-shout all the others, too.

Essad Pasha beamed. “Is it not marvelous?” he said.

“That’s one word,” I more or less agreed. “I will remember it forever.” And so I have, most often in the small hours of the morning. Usually, though, the nightmare doesn’t come back when I fall asleep again.

A man in a wolfskin jacket suddenly appeared beside Essad Pasha. The newcomer’s face might have been a wolf ’s, too, with its hungry mouth, sharp muzzle, golden eyes, and rough-trimmed gray hair. Beaming no more, Essad Pasha said, “Your Highness, here is the Grand Boyar Vuk Nedic, Vlachia’s representative in Peshkepiia.”

“Your Excellency.” I bowed.

“Your Highness.” So did he, all the while eyeing me as a wolf might eye a juicy joint of beef in a butcher’s window. But it wasn’t me he was hungry for, it was my kingdom. In throatily accented Schlepsigian, he went on, “Fushe-Kuqe should be Vlachian. Vlachia should have-Vlachia must have-a port on the Tiberian Sea.”

I bowed. “I have two things to say to that. The first one is, the Powers have agreed that there is to be a Kingdom of Shqiperi, with Fushe-Kuqe as its port, and I am going to be King of Shqiperi. Of all of it, to be plain.”

Vuk Nedic had teeth almost as sharp as a wolf ’s, too. He bared them now, as if to prove it. A small strain of lycanthropy? Not unknown among Vlachs-no, indeed. I wondered how charming he would be when the moon came full.

“That agreement was not just-Is not just,” he growled. No Vlach will ever be persuaded that anything giving him less than his wildest desires is just. And since Vlachs’ desires are often wild indeed…They are a people whose charm is perhaps best appreciated at some distance.

I bowed again. “The second thing I have to say is, I suggest you take that up with Count Rappaport over there.”

Vuk Nedic’s eyes blazed so you could have lit a cigar at them. One of the reasons the agreement made sure Vlachia came away without a seaport was that the Dual Monarchy insisted on it. Since the Dual Monarchy has Vlachia on its southern border, it doesn’t enjoy the luxury of appreciating Vlachs at a distance. As a matter of fact, the Dual Monarchy doesn’t appreciate Vlachs at all. It’s mutual.

It would have made an interesting confrontation: the fop in the gaudy uniform and the hemidemisemiwerewolf. But Vuk Nedic was the one who had no stomach for it. Vlachia could huff and puff till it blew the Nekemte Peninsula down, but it would never be more than a third-rate kingdom. The Dual Monarchy was a Power: a Power that had seen better centuries, true, but a Power nevertheless. If reminded of that forcibly enough, it could make Vlachia very, very unhappy.

And Vuk Nedic knew it. He stomped away. Stomping isn’t easy on a rammed-earth floor, but he managed. He poured a tumbler full of brandy and knocked it back at a gulp. Vlachs follow the Two Prophets (even if they are benighted Zibeonites), so he didn’t have to not drink even a single drop.

“Nicely handled, your Highness,” Essad Pasha murmured.

“That bugger’ll scrag you if he gets even half a chance, your Highness,” Max murmured.

“Thank you,” I murmured to both of them. Why not? As far as I could see, they were both right.

I got some brandy of my own, and some fried meat. I had just begun to eat and drink when Essad Pasha introduced me to a certain Barisha, the royal commissioner from Belagora. Belagora has its own king, but it’s another kingdom full of Vlachs. Barisha fit the part, even if his outfit didn’t. If you can imagine a werewolf in a getup that probably made Count Rappaport jealous, you have him to perfection.

He was every bit as friendly as Vuk Nedic, too. “The borderline in the north of Shqiperi is mistaken,” he said without preamble. “That is really southern Belagora.”

“I intend to stick to the agreement as it is down on paper,” I said.

“The agreement may be down on paper,” he replied, “but Belagoran soldiers are on the ground. They will stay there, and they will take Tremist and the rest of the ground we claim.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” I told him.

“If you go looking for trouble in the north, I promise you will find it,” Barisha said. “And I promise it will find you.”

I switched from Schlepsigian to Hassocki: “Thou art as false as water. May thy pernicious soul rot half a grain a day!”

He understood me. I’d thought he would. Nearly everyone in the Nekemte Peninsula knows enough Hassocki to curse with. “As thine uncle was beaten, so shalt thou be, thou pus-filled carbuncle on the arse of mankind.”

I bowed. “Please to give my kindest compliments to thy father, should thy mother chance to know which of her customers he was.”

After the exchange of compliments, we parted company. “You have shown him you are not to be trifled with,” Essad Pasha said. “He will remember it, as I do.” He sent Max a furtive glance.

My aide-de-camp had a different prediction: “He’ll give you one in the ballocks, the second he figures he can.”

“Not if I give him one first,” I replied. This sentiment met Essad Pasha’s approval.

I met Sir Owsley Owlswick of Albion, who couldn’t possibly have been as clever as he looked (and wasn’t); Baron Corvo of Torino, who couldn’t possibly have been as effeminate as he seemed (and, again, wasn’t: his numerous bastards prove it); and Count Potemkin of vast and frozen Tver, who couldn’t possibly have got that drunk that fast every night (but, from everything I saw, did).

And I formally met Count Rappaport. His Schlepsigian had a whipped-cream-in-your-coffee, strudel-on-the-side juiciness that went with his uniform but not with his eyes. He looked me up and down, not once but twice. “By the Prophets,” he said, “I don’t believe you’re Halim Eddin at all.”