Harry Turtledove - Every Inch a King

When we got back to the circus tent, we started practicing for the evening show. Max had no trouble. I discovered doing trapeze flips with one of those sausages in my stomach was every bit as enjoyable as if I’d swallowed a thirty-pound catapult stone instead. If I had a weak stomach, I never would have turned acrobat in the first place, but I don’t think I ever put it to a sterner test.

I was upside down in midair when I spotted the messenger boy in the blue CC uniform. “Are you looking for Otto of Schlepsig?” I called in Hassocki as soon as I was right side up again.

“That’s right, sir. Are you he?” The kid spoke with a Lokrian accent, but we could understand each other.

“I am no one else but the king of acrobats, Otto himself.” Hard to strike a pose while hanging from a trapeze, but I managed. If a man will not blow a blast from his own horn, it shall remain unblown forever.

I cut the rehearsal short to see what Murad Bey had to say. No one else was likely to send me a crystal message, not unless some of my stubborner creditors had finally found out what show I was playing in. I gave the messenger boy a couple of coppers and sent him on his way.

My thumbnail cracked the wax seal on the message. I unrolled the paper and read the transcription. It was from Murad Bey. That which you asked me to accomplish, my brother, it is accomplished, he wrote. Go, then, and may good fortune attend you.

“Ha!” I said, and, “Ha!” again. I turned a couple of backflips. Suddenly the sausage seemed to weigh nothing at all. I carried the message over to Max. “Here! Take a look at this!”

He made a gurgling noise. He had some considerable length of steel down his throat. In due course, it came out again. He wiped off the blade-swallowing a rusty sword is probably not something he wanted to do. Then he took the message and scowled at it. “What’s it say?” he asked. “I speak some Hassocki, but I don’t read it.”

“Some aide-de-camp you’ll make,” I muttered, and translated what Murad Bey had said. Right about now, another messenger boy in a blue Consolidated Crystal uniform would be delivering not one but two messages to Essad Pasha in Shqiperi. One of them would purport to come from the Hassockian Atabeg himself, and would say, Prince Halim Eddin is coming. He has supreme command over all troops present in Shqiperi. The other would pretend to come from the high command of the Hassocki Army in Vyzance, and would say, Prince Halim Eddin is coming. Immediately turn over supreme command in Shqiperi to him.

Max clapped a hand to his forehead. It happened to be the hand holding the sword, but he didn’t cut himself. “You are out of your mind,” he said.

“Yes, my dear, but I have fun.” I pulled him down to my height and kissed him on both cheeks. He said something in Hassocki I won’t repeat, even in translation. I laughed. Why not? The plot-a really pretty little plot, if I do say so myself-had started to move.

Another show down. Like most shows, it was measured more by what didn’t happen than by what did. Ilona didn’t come out of her costume. The lions didn’t eat Cadogan, or even sharpen their claws on him. The mammoth didn’t squash Ilona or any of the clowns. Max didn’t cut his throat, from the inside out or otherwise. And I didn’t splatter myself in the middle of the ring.

The marks ate it up anyway. Maybe we were better than usual. Maybe, what with everything that had happened to Thasos lately, they were starved for anything that might be amusing. I know which way I’d bet.

After the performance, I caught Max’s eye. He tried to pretend he didn’t see me: he made an elaborate production of lighting up a stogie that would do his cough a world of good. I walked over to him. “Come on,” I said. “The time has come. You’re not going to back out on me, are you?”

He looked as if he would have liked nothing better. But then, if you wait for Max to look enthusiastic, you’ll wait till the Final Prophecy comes true, and twenty minutes longer. Puffing a cloud of noxious smoke, he unfolded himself from his stool. He towered over me, and I’m not short. “Let’s get it over with,” he said, as if about to call on the tooth-drawer.

Side by side, we went up to Dooger and Cark. They were side by side, too, behind the table where they counted the take. As far as they were concerned, money counted for more than a couple of performers. Eventually, though, since we didn’t go away, they had to notice us, or to admit they did. Dooger looked over at Cark. “We’re at 2675,” he said.

“Yes, 2675,” Cark agreed in that nameless accent of his. They both wrote the figure down. The important business temporarily suspended, they could deal with the likes of us.

“What is it?” Dooger demanded of me. It had better be interesting, his tone warned. I don’t think he sleeps in a coffin, but I wouldn’t swear. I know bloody well he doesn’t sleep with me-and a good thing, too, says I.

Max coughed. It had nothing to do with the stinking cigar. It just gave him an excuse not to talk. Me, I never need an excuse to talk. “Boss-bosses-we quit,” I said. “We want our pay up through tonight.”

“You can’t do that,” Cark said. If what he gave us wasn’t the evil eye, I’ve never seen it. He’s a squat little toadlike fellow who doesn’t blink much at the best of times. When he’s angry, he doesn’t blink at all. It’s unnerving. It really is. You start wondering when you last paid a temple a proper visit.

I stood there and waited. Max stood there with me, Eliphalet bless him. Obviously, we could walk out whenever we cursed well pleased. Whether we could get paid…That was a more intricate question.

Dooger tilted his head back so he could look down his nose at me even though I was standing up. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Run off and be a king?” He laughed at his own joke. Even Cark let out a couple of dry little croaks that might have stood for amusement.

I bowed to each of them in turn. “How did you guess?” I answered. “And since you’re making free with the royal treasury…”

“We ought to throw you out on your arse, your Majesty.” Dooger turned it into a title of scorn. As if by real sorcery, a couple of hulking roustabouts appeared behind him.

Wheep! Max’s sword slid out of the scabbard. The blade glittered in the torchlight. I was so used to thinking of it as a prop for his act, I’d almost forgotten about it as a weapon. So, plainly, had Dooger and Cark. But any sword that would slice bread would do a pretty fair job of slicing circus proprietor, too.

“I think perhaps you might want to reconsider.” As usual, Max sounded as if he couldn’t care less whether he lived or died. That made him more scary, not less.

Dooger and Cark went back and forth in a nameless tongue, possibly Cark’s birthspeech. Cark gestured to the roustabouts. They vanished into the shadows as fast as they’d shown up. Maybe Dooger really had conjured them out of thin air. I wouldn’t put it past him.

He glared at us now. “We’ll pay you,” he said heavily. “We’ll pay you, all right, and we’ll blacken your names from Vyzance to Baile Atha Cliath.”

I laughed in his face. “As if telling anybody we had to work for Dooger and Cark’s wouldn’t do the job.”

Dooger said something in Yagmar. Off behind us, Ilona let out a yip of surprise and possibly horror, so it must have been choice. Without a word, Cark slammed coins down on the table. They came from all over the known world: Lokrian leptas and fractions, Hassocki piasters, dinars from from Vlachia, dinars from Belagora (which are heavier), a thaler or two out of the Dual Monarchy, a couple of livres from Narbonensis, some Schlepsigian krams, and a few shillings from Albion.