Harry Turtledove - Every Inch a King

One other thing: hogs in Shqiperi are not the plump, placid pink porkers we turn into hams in Schlepsig. They are one short step, one very short step, up from wild boars. You can’t go through their wallows. You would resent it. If you try to go around their wallows, they are apt to resent it-and to come after you. When we bombarded one brazen beast with rocks to keep him from eating us instead of the other way round, his farmer resented it. He shouted loudly and irately in Shqipetari.

“Thou wretched, bloody, and usurping boar!” I replied in Hassocki. “Thou hast a sow for a mistress, and right sorry am I to have disturbed thy brats!”

He understood me. All over the Nekemte Peninsula, people revile one another in Hassocki, even when they don’t use it for anything else. This says something about the language and something about the Hassocki-nothing good in either case, I fear me.

“Let vultures vile seize on thy lungs!” he cried. “May thy yard rot off!”

“Thy yard is but an inch!” Max shouted at him.

After a few more such pleasantries, we went on our way. We soon found we hadn’t skirted the wallow quite well enough, for its stench went on our way with us. When we came to a small stream, we paused to clean the muck off our boots.

Max wiped at his with a tuft of grass. “This is a pain in the morass,” he grumbled.

“Look on the bright side,” I said, something he was unlikely to do without encouragement-or with it, for that matter. “Essad Pasha won’t find us as long as we keep going down tracks like these.”

“Of course he won’t.” Max threw the clump of grass into the stream. It floated away. “No one could find us here. We couldn’t find ourselves here if we went out looking for us.”

I started to follow that one through its range of possibilities, then gave it up as a bad job. We climbed to our feet and splashed across the little creek. Several frogs jumped off of rocks and into the water and swam away. They must have taken us for Narbonese.

Perhaps half a mile farther on, things got more complicated. The track we were following stopped. I don’t mean it just sort of petered out. It stopped. A considerable gully interrupted it. I considered the gully-unhappily. The track resumed on the far side. Maybe it had been made before the gully was there. Maybe, once upon a time, a bridge spanned the gap. If so, somebody’d bridgenapped it.

I peered down into the gully, wondering if the troll who’d lived under the bridge-if there’d ever been a bridge-could tell me anything. I didn’t see any trolls. Maybe he’d been trollnapped. Maybe there’d never been a troll. If there had been a troll, maybe he’d decided he was no homelier than anybody else in Shqiperi and gone off to Peshkepiia. The only thing I was sure of was that he hadn’t been in my harem.

“Well, now what?” Max asked.

If we went back, we’d have to go all the way back to the main road. Essad Pasha, Colonel Kemal, Major Mustafa, and Josй-Diego made that seem less than desirable. If we went forward, we needed wings. Eliphalet wasn’t likely to grant a prayer for them. Just on the off chance, I sent one up anyway. Eliphalet was not only unlikely to grant one, he bloody well didn’t.

I sighed. “Back to that last farm,” I said. “We need some rope.”

“Planning to hang yourself?” Max inquired.

“No-you,” I said. We glared at each other. I went on, “With rope, I may be able to get across. You may even be able to get across.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“I’d kill myself if I tried to swallow your sword,” I said. “What kind of a tightrope walker are you?”

“We’ve been walking a tightrope since we got here. But that isn’t what you meant, is it?” Max gave me a large, loose-jointed shrug. “Better to use the rope to get across the gully than to give it to the hangman. He already has plenty of rope to make us dance on air.”

“Try not to cheer me up any more,” I said. “I may fall over and die of joy.”

“You can die of all sorts of things in this Prophets-forsaken place,” Max said. “Now that we’re out of the harem, joy isn’t likely to be one of them.”

We walked back to the farm. Since we’d exchanged endearments with the farmer, I wondered whether he would turn his dogs-or, maybe worse, his hogs-loose on us. “Can you sell us some rope?” I called to him in Hassocki.

He looked as much like a bandit as any Shqipetar I’d ever seen, which is saying something. “What do you want it for?” he asked.

“I know a spell that will make it stand up so we can climb all the way to heaven,” I answered. The less I told him, the better off I expected to be.

The only trouble with saying what I did say was, it made him raise his price. I suppose he thought any rope that was going to heaven had to be expensive. But what a Shqipetari farmer finds expensive doesn’t badly hurt someone who’s been pawing through a royal treasury, even a small royal treasury like Shqiperi’s (smaller now-oh, yes!).

As we headed back to the gully, he wanted to follow us. Max discouraged him. Max could discourage anything this side of a mammoth, I suspect. The farmer wasn’t much brighter than a mammoth, but he was a good deal smaller. He decided he’d have to get to heaven on his own, not on our coattails. I thought his odds poor; even the Quadrate God must be more fussy about the company he keeps than that. But the Quadrate God’s companions aren’t my worry, Eliphalet be thanked.

Several tall trees stood on our side of the gully. Others leaned toward them from the far side, but not close enough-not to someone without special talent, anyhow. Special talent I had-or, at least, I hoped I had.

I handed Max my current share of the royal treasury-and if that doesn’t prove I trusted him, obstructive and obstreperous as he was, nothing ever would. I also took off my boots. Barefoot was better for what I’d have to do. That coil of rope attached to my belt, I climbed an oak that had a stout branch sticking out over the gully. My target was an outthrust branch on a tall tree on the other side.

I tied one end of the rope to my branch. Then I let myself down, and then I began to swing back and forth, harder and harder. Each pendulum swing took me farther across the gully. I started to feel like part of the works from one of those elaborate mechanical clocks you’ll see in towers all across Schlepsig. That other outthrust branch came closer and closer. I reached and-missed.

Another swing, and then yet another to rebuild the momentum I’d squandered. I reached out-and caught the branch I wanted. I couldn’t pull myself up onto it with one arm. I had to let go of the rope with both hands, holding on to it with only my feet. Yes, I was glad I had toes to grip with! I wished I were a forest ape; then I would have come equipped with a couple of extra thumbs.

What I had sufficed. Once I was up on the branch on the far side, I tied the rope to it. Then I stood up and also tied the rope to a branch above it. And then, holding the rest of the coil in my right hand, I started back across the tightrope I’d created. A tightrope made a good enough bridge for me. It wouldn’t do for Max, not by itself. But if he had one strand on which to put his feet and another above it to hold on to, I thought that would be good enough to get him across.

Nothing ever turns out to be as simple as you wish it would.

“Grrr! Who’s that walking on my bridge? Grrr!” No, the troll hadn’t been there a few minutes before, when I looked down into the gully. But then, the bridge hadn’t been there a few minutes before, either.

And there he stood, on top of my strand of rope. Or possibly she-it could only matter to another troll. This one had plenty of ugly for both sexes. Green complexion. Warts. Hair. Fangs. Claws. All the standard equipment, including a bad attitude.