Harry Turtledove - Every Inch a King

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re going to be late.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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