Harry Turtledove - Every Inch a King

“Happy now?” Dooger growled when Cark stopped doling out silver.

“Let me use your scale,” I told him. That made him growl some more, and Cark, too. But they passed it over. When I got everything balanced, the alleged pay was light. Not by a lot, mind you, but light. I didn’t say anything. The scales spoke for themselves.

Muttering, Cark tossed a big silver cartwheel onto the left pan. The shekel from far-off Vespucciland almost made the scales balance. A sixth-dinar piece-silver so thin, you could almost see through it-evened things out. “Happy now?” Cark croaked.

“Delighted,” I told him. And I was, too. We had money, we had a plan, and the worst that could happen to us was death by torture. What was there to worry about?

I used the scales again, this time to make sure Max and I came out even. That sixth-dinar piece and a couple of others nearly as light proved handy for getting things right.

“You’re really leaving?” Ludovic said when we’d settled our business with the proprietors. “I don’t know whether to be angry or jealous.”

Cadogan looked glum enough to let his lions eat him. “I wish I could go, too,” he said, sounding almost as somber as Max.

“Why don’t you?” I asked.

He stared at me the way people always stare when you’ve asked a really stupid question. “Don’t be silly, Otto. Who’d take me if I left this outfit?” It wasn’t that he was wrong, either, poor bastard.

Ilona came up to me. Like Ludovic, she asked, “You’re really leaving?” When I nodded, she kissed me hard enough to make every hair in my mustache-among other things-stand on end.

Once I could see straight again, I wheezed, “Eliphalet! Why didn’t you ever do that before?”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “But, darling, you might have thought I meant it.” Before I could either grab her or slug her-Ilona usually made you want to do both at once-she adhered to Max. I don’t know how else to describe it. She kissed him even more thoroughly than she had me.

His eyes lit up. He wiggled his ears. He really did-the mammoth couldn’t have done it better. Color-veritable pink!-came into his sallow cheeks. All things considered, he looked amazingly lifelike. When the clinch finally broke-and he milked it for all it was worth and then some-he leered down at Ilona and murmured, “Well, sweetheart, are you a sword-swallower, too?”

She slapped him just as hard as she’d kissed him. The party went on from there.

It got drunk out, though not quite as drunk as it had the night we played our first show in Thasos. A good thing, too. I’m getting too old to do that as often as I used to. I don’t like to believe that. I don’t want to believe it. But my carcass reminds me of it more forcefully with each year that goes by.

Even Dooger and Cark, having finished counting their more or less ill-gotten gains, came over to hoist a few. Dooger put an arm around my shoulder. I kept my eye on his other hand, to make sure he didn’t try filching what Cark had been so pleased to pay me.

He affected not to notice. “Ah, my boy!” he said, sounding tiddlier than he was. “I love you like my own son!”

“Do you?” I said. “Is that the one you sold to the Tzigany?”

He laughed, though I hadn’t been upwards of two-sevenths kidding. “A funny man, too!” he said. “You should put on a clown suit and go on with the rest of that troupe. Otto the Impossible! You’d have star billing!”

“No, thanks,” I said, which is what anyone in his right mind should say when Dooger starts scheming. If saying no thanks doesn’t do the job, running away quickly may still save you. Since I was going to run away anyhow-for once in my life, not running away to join the circus-I went on, “I’d hate cleaning white greasepaint out of my mustache every night.”

“Shave it off.” As usual, Dooger had all the answers. Also as usual, most of them were to the wrong questions.

He and Cark tried to raise a stink about letting Max and me sleep in our wagons one more night after we’d left the company. Everybody else screamed at them. Even some of the roustabouts sided with us. And so, with poor grace, the proprietors backed down. I had the feeling they’d take it out on the rest of the company first chance they got.

The wagon’s springs creaked when I settled myself in my cot. I expected I’d wake up with a headache in the morning, but not with the galloping horrors I’d had not long before. Most headaches are soluble in Hassocki coffee.

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when the springs creaked again and the wagon shifted. Somebody besides me was in there. Roustabouts? Were Dooger and Cark going to throw me out after the rest of the company had gone to bed? Not without a fight, they weren’t. I reached out-and touched warm, smooth, bare flesh.

Ilona giggled. “If I’d done this before, darling,” she whispered, “you might have thought I meant it.” The springs did considerable creaking after that, let me tell you. I didn’t have a headache the next morning, either. Did she visit Max, too, before me or afterwards? To this day, I don’t know. I’m sorry for him if she didn’t, though.

Max and I even got breakfast the next morning. If Dooger and Cark didn’t deduct the cost of our rolls and honey and coffee from the company’s share, they were missing a trick, and they don’t miss many tricks like that. And speaking of a roll with honey, Ilona was sweetly impersonal to me and to Max both. Her manner said nothing had happened in the nighttime-and even if it had, it hadn’t.

She did kiss us goodbye, on the cheek; she stood on tiptoe and Max bent down so she could reach his. Then, duffels slung over our shoulders, we were on our own. Max looked as if his rowboat had just sunk in sea-serpent-infested waters. I felt a little rocky myself, to tell you the truth. Not having the troupe at my back was daunting. These were the people who were always ready, when things seemed bad, to tell you why they were really worse. They were also the people who would try to pitch in and make them better. And now we’d turned our backs on them.

“Well,” Max said lugubriously, “what next, your Majesty?” He didn’t make that as noxious as Dooger had the night before. From him, it felt more like you sap.

I’d been thinking about what next, in the odd moments when I wasn’t thinking about Ilona or about almost getting skinned by Dooger and Cark. “We’re playing roles, right?” I said. “Roles, yes, except on the stage of life, not the one where they throw cabbages if you blow your lines.”

“They’ll do worse than that if we blow our lines,” Max said.

Ignoring him, I went on, “If we’re playing roles, what do we need?”

“Better sense?” he suggested.

He was getting harder to ignore, but I managed. I am a man of many talents. “We need costumes,” I said. “If I remember rightly, Prince Halim Eddin is a colonel in the Hassocki army. And if you’re going to be my aide-de-camp, you should be a captain or something.”

“If I’m going to be your aide-de-camp, I should have my head examined,” Max said.

“Did anyone candle thy skull, he’d doubtless find it empty,” I said in Hassocki.

“Better empty than full of thy madness, the which is worse than a dog’s and more assuredly fatal,” Max replied in the same language. His accent was improving with practice.

He didn’t ask me where we would come by Hassocki officers’ uniforms. The atabeg’s officers-and men-had done everything they could to escape when forces from Lokris and Plovdiv converged on Thasos. Everything included shedding their uniforms and sneaking away in civilian clothes-or, for all I knew, naked. All the tailor’s shops in Threadneedle Street displayed discarded dusty-brown Hassocki military togs. We could pick and choose.