Harry Turtledove - Every Inch a King

We went in. Max held the door open for me. “Your Majesty,” he murmured-and then let go of the door so it swung shut and got me in the seat of the pants.

“Some aide-de-camp you turned out to be,” I said. “I should have asked Ilona.”

“There’s a difference between aide-de-camp and camp follower,” Max said loftily. He was lucky Ilona wasn’t there to hear that. She would have followed him, all right-with a knife.

Inside the CC headquarters, you never would have known that Thasos had changed hands not long before, or that fighting still sputtered not far away. Everything was peaceful and orderly. People-Lokrians, Hassocki, an Albionese merchant in baggy tweeds, us-waited in line for the next available crystallographer. Lots of places in Thasos, lines just sit there. They don’t move. Not at CC headquarters. Perish the thought. Those people know what efficiency means.

We got to the front of the line pretty quick. “Good morning, gentlemen,” the clerk said in fluent Schlepsigian. I’d already heard him use Lokrian and Hassocki. A man of parts, plainly, and smart parts at that. I look like Halim Eddin-and I had the picture to prove it!-while Max could be anything under the sun except handsome. But this clever young fellow pegged us.

The crystallographer he sent us to also spoke Schlepsigian, though with a Hassocki accent. “To whom do you wish to send your message, gentlemen?” he asked.

“To Major Murad Bey, at the Ministry of War in Vyzance,” I answered.

He blinked. “I hope the Lokrians’ sorcerers will pass it,” he said. “Lokris and the Hassockian Empire are still at war, you know.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” I said. He was a swarthy man, but his cheeks went pink anyhow. I went on, “I suppose they’ll use the intent test. They’re welcome to, for I mean no harm to Lokris.”

“Ah. Good. Excellent, in fact.” He blinked again. “You know something of this business.”

“A little something, maybe-no more.” I knew a good deal more, but that wasn’t the crystallographer’s affair. It’s a long story. In fact, I wasn’t even there when they thought I was. If I was there, I didn’t do it. If I did do it, I didn’t mean it. And if I did mean it, the bastard had it coming. But I digress. Back to it: “Here is the message.” I gave it to him, finishing, “Please acknowledge at CC office Thasos.”

“I’ll send it. They will vet it,” the crystallographer warned. I shrugged. He bent low over the crystal on his desk. In places like Albion and Narbonensis, crystallographers wear turbans to look mystical. In Thasos, ordinary people wear turbans. The crystallographer probably wore one himself when he went off duty. Here, he had on a homburg to look modern.

He murmured the necessary charms, and the eight-digit number that made sure he reached a particular crystal in Vyzance and not one in, say, Lutetia. Nobody in the capital of Narbonensis needed to know anything about this. No, not yet.

Light flared in the heart of the transparent crystal sphere. As it faded, I saw the tiny image of another crystallographer. He too had a homburg on his head. Vyzance, sure enough.

Our crystallographer recited the message. The other crystallographer read it back. His voice sounded as if it came from very far away. As a matter of fact, it did come from very far away, even if the crystal sat right there in front of it. When the men on both sides of the connection agreed they had the message straight, they broke the arcane link. The crystal on the crystallographer’s desk went back to being a bocci ball for ghosts.

“You told the truth-I had no interference from the Lokrians,” our crystallographer said. “If there is a reply to this…communication, it will be delivered to you at the carnival.”

“Circus!” I said indignantly. Eliphalet help me-Zibeon, too-there is another step down from Dooger and Cark’s. I’ve played in carnivals. I hope I never have to do it again. It’s not honest work, and that’s the best I can say for it.

The crystallographer would have had to cheer up to seem unimpressed. “Go in peace,” he murmured. “North and south, east and west, go in peace.” Yes, he followed the Quadrate God.

“North and south, east and west, peace to you as well,” I said in Hassocki. His big, dark eyes widened. He didn’t hear that every day from an obvious follower of the Two Prophets.

Max and I had to stand in another line to settle the tab for the message. Anywhere in Thasos but here, we could have dickered to our hearts’ content. We could have drawn up chairs, ordered some thick, sweet Hassocki-style coffee, taken a few puffs from the mouthpiece of a water pipe, and told the clerk what a thief he was. Lokrians are as mad for haggling as Hassocki. But not at Consolidated Crystal. One price per word, all over the civilized world and in as many of the barbarous parts as they reach. They don’t even charge extra in Tver, and if that doesn’t prove my point, nothing ever would.

“Now what?” Max asked as we left the CC offices. “We wait to find out whether this Murad Bey is as daft as you are?”

I wouldn’t have put it precisely like that. Since Max had, though, I swept off my hat and gave him my grandest bow. “What else?” I said.

“We could make our funeral arrangements now,” he suggested. “We’ll probably be too busy dying to do it later.” Before I could find something suitably devastating to say to that, he shook his head. “No-wouldn’t help. No undertaker here is going to have a branch office in Shqiperi.”

“Think on the bright side, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “You’re going to be aide-de-camp to a king. You’ll help make decisions of state. And you’ll brag about it afterwards as long as you live.”

“Twenty minutes’ worth of bragging. Oh, joy.” Max is a good fellow in a great many ways, but he’s convinced every silver lining has a cloud.

We stopped on the way back to the circus and bought sausages skewered on sticks and then dipped in maize batter and fried: a local delicacy indigestible enough to satisfy the most ambitious dyspeptic. The sausage-seller was a Lokrian-probably not named Kleon, worse luck. He tried to charge us some outrageous price because we were foreigners. I couldn’t tell him what I thought of him in his own language, but figured he was likely to understand Hassocki: “Thou dog and son of a dog, thou wouldst steal the silver set on the eyes of thy mother’s corpse.”

“May the fleas of a thousand camels afflict thy scrotum,” he returned amiably. We haggled in Hassocki, though some of the gestures we used had nothing to do with numbers. I finally argued him down to something approaching reason.

Max bit into his sausage. The batter crunched. Grease ran down his chin. He nodded approval. “Not bad. They’d go good with a seidel or two of beer.”

Now, what passes for beer in Thasos is a far cry from what we brew in Schlepsig. Much of it, indeed, tastes as if it has passed-through the kidneys of a diabetic donkey. Still, as they say, any beer is better than none, and the food had plenty of flavor to make up for what the drink lacked. We found a beer cellar. We found its product…adequate.

Having swallowed the last bite of sausage, Max swallowed the stick, too-after his sword, it hardly made an hors d’oeuvre. The tapman’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. I hoped-and so, no doubt, did Max-he’d be astonished enough to give us our next seidel free. He wasn’t. He didn’t. Bit by bit, naпvetй leaks out of the world.

I was looking forward to Shqiperi. I was sure naпvetй lingered there. It must have, or the Shqipetari wouldn’t have believed a king would solve their problems. Or maybe Essad Pasha, being a Hassocki general, thought a king of his own blood would solve his problems.