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.
“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.
III
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.
Or I could, anyway. I am a good-sized man, but neither enormously tall nor enormously wide. The second tailor we visited had exactly what I needed, right down to the boots and the belt buckle and the epaulets. We haggled for a while. He even knocked off another piaster and a half when I noticed a very neatly repaired tear in the back of the jacket. It was about what a rapier would have made going in.
No sign of a bloodstain around it, even on the inside of the material. Cold water will soak them out if you’re patient, and who ever heard of an impatient tailor?
But when I asked about a captain’s uniform for Max, this fellow bowed and shook his head. “My liver is wrung, O most noble one,” he said in Hassocki, which we’d been using, “but I have none fit for a man of his, ah, altitude.”
“No, no.” Max shook his head. “Otto is his Highness here.”
The tailor scratched his head. I made as if to kick Max. Without moving a muscle, he let me know that wouldn’t be a good idea. I turned back to the tailor. “Know you, my good man, if any of your colleagues might have attire suitable to his stature?”
“I know not, I fear me. It is written, Seek and ye may find.”
I’d always heard it as Seek and ye shall find. Considering how Max is put together, the tailor’s version made better sense. “Verily, it is so written, or if it be not written so, so should it be written,” I said. He was chewing on that as Max and I left his shop. Max looked as if he was also chewing on that, or possibly on his cud. By the time we’d walked into the next tailor’s shop, I was chewing on it myself. It certainly sounded as if it ought to mean something, whether it did or not.
We ended up walking into every tailor’s establishment on Threadneedle Street. Every tailor without exception
took one dismayed look at Max, rolled his eyes, shook his head, and threw up his hands. “I’m not cut out to be an aide-de-camp,” Max said. “Maybe I should go as your stepladder instead.”
“Did Eliphalet lose heart when he faced the Tharpian King of Kings?” I demanded. “Keep your chin up, man.”
He did. It made him look even taller. He must have known as much, too, for he said, “Eliphalet wasn’t six feet eight.”
“Not on the outside,” I said, and cribbed from a hymn: “In spirit he was ten feet tall.”
“Nobody ever tries to put your spirit in a uniform,” Max said, which was true but so resolutely unhelpful that I pretended not to hear it.
Right next to Threadneedle Street is Copperbottom Alley. That’s not where the tinkers and potmakers work; their establishments are along the Street of the Boiled Second Stomach-a Hassocki delicacy that loses something in the translation and even more, I assure you, in the ingestion. No, Copperbottom Alley houses secondhand shops and houses of the three gold globes and other not quite shady, not quite sunny enterprises. I was sure we could buy Hassocki captain’s uniforms there; I was fairly sure we could buy ourselves a couple of Hassocki captains, if for some reason we happened to need them.
Whether we could find a uniform to fit Max…Well, I wasn’t so sure about that, but I wasn’t about to admit I wasn’t so sure, either.
When we walked into the first secondhand shop, the proprietor, a round little Hassocki, shook his head. “I am wounded to the very heart of me that I find myself unable to aid my masters,” he said, “but perhaps they will seek the place of business of Manolis the Lokrian. North and south, east and west, by the strength of my bowels no one else in Thasos is more likely to possess that which, should you acquire it, would make your spirits sing.”
Manolis the Lokrian proved to run a house of the three gold globes halfway along Copperbottom Alley. Luckily, he wrote his name on the window in Hassocki characters as well as his own. A bell above his door jangled when Max and I went in.
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