“We have a ship to catch,” I said, wondering what kind of horrible scow the Gamemeno would turn out to be.
The hackman was thinking along the same lines. “A garbage barge?” he muttered. He slammed the door shut with what I thought quite unnecessary force, climbed up to his seat, and cracked the whip over the horse’s back. Springs creaking and big, iron-tired wheels clanging and bouncing over cobblestones, we set out.
Next to no one was on the sidewalk. Street traffic was drastically down, too. The riots had ended, but the locals feared they might pick up again any minute now. That was how it felt to me, too. When I said as much, Max looked at me and said, “I suppose you’ll tell me there’s a bright spot to all this, too.”
“Well, there may be,” I said. His expression could have frozen the ice to congeal the fat I was talking about before. “There may,” I insisted. “If anything will keep footpads at home beating their children, it’s the chance of getting caught in a riot.”
“You’re reaching,” Max said, and said no more.
Some of the people who were out and about didn’t have homes or flats any more. I say that partly because they looked as if they’d been wearing the same clothes for days-and they had-and partly because the cab rattled past the burnt-out ruins of quite a few homes and flats. Maybe the arsonists who started those fires hadn’t managed to turn all of Lakedaimon into a roasting pit, but nobody could say they hadn’t tried. The sour smell of old smoke hung in the air like an unwelcome guest who couldn’t figure out it was time to leave.
Shops had gone up in flames, too. Here and there, shopkeepers or hired guards patrolled the ruins to make sure nobody greedy went digging through the ashes. “The cradle of civilization,” Max remarked-and if that isn’t a judgment on a lot of things that have happened since the glory days of Lakedaimon, it will do till a nastier one comes along.
As we went down toward the waterfront, the neighborhood got worse. Back in ancient times, Lakedaimon’s port was a separate city. Nowadays, it’s just a slum. Even the good parts-like the quay from which the Halcyon had sailed-weren’t very good, and the bad parts were horrid. I would have taken the three gold globes for the harborside emblem if not for the profusion of wine jars and jugs of spirits over the taverns and the similar profusion of houses-if that’s the word I want-with red lanterns out front. It was the sort of place where cats didn’t eat rats. They got fat off protection money instead.
The hackman had the accursed gall to charge us three times as much for going from Papa Ioannakis’ to the harbor as the other fellow had charged for going from the harbor to the hostel. When I squawked, he suddenly stopped understanding Narbonese. “What’s going on?” Max asked. Wheep! Out came his sword, the way it had when Dooger and Cark tried to cheat us.
Maybe Wheep! is a word in Lokrian. Maybe the sight of the blade glittering in the famous Lokrian sunshine jogged the hackman’s memory. All of a sudden, Narbonese made sense to him again. So did the notion that he might-by unfortunate accident, of course-have tried to charge us too much. He was glad to accept the fare I proposed. He was even gladder to hop back up onto his cab and get out of there as fast as he could.
If I were a hackman, I would have been glad to get out of there, too. I don’t think Max noticed, but three or four men who, if they weren’t ruffians and robbers, could certainly have played them on the stage sidled towards us while I had my little…conversation with the driver. When his sword left the scabbard, they discovered they had business elsewhere. Coshing a very big man isn’t much harder than bopping anybody else over the head. Coshing a very big man who’s liable to run steel through your liver is a different sort of affair, one for which they had less appetite.
When Max started to sheath the sword, I set a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should leave that out,” I said. “It, ah, persuades people.”
He looked down at it, coughed, and shrugged. “However you like,” he said.
I didn’t like much about the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. I didn’t say anything about not liking it. We had to be where we were to get where we were going. That didn’t make it a garden spot. If I’d grumbled, though, think what Max would have said. I thought of it, and decided I didn’t want to hear it.
After the would-be highwaymen hit the highway (actually a foul-smelling, muddy alley where better than half the cobblestones were only memories), several poxed trollops came up to us. Well, I don’t know they were poxed, but the odds seemed good. Trollops they definitely were, in tawdry, tight-fitting finery and with painted faces more mercenary than any mercenary’s. They greeted us with endearments and obscenities-did they know the difference, or care?-in everything from Hassocki to Albionese.
I swept off my hat and bowed to them. After I nudged Max, he did the same. As always, his deep bow produced stares of astonishment, at least from the soiled doves who weren’t eyeing his crotch. Come to that, they looked more than a little astonished, too; the trousers on that ridiculous uniform fit snugly.
“My ladies,” I said (two lies in two words-can’t do much better than that), “can you tell me how to find the Gamemeno?” I stuck to Narbonese. More of them seemed to use it than any other, er, tongue.
Maybe I was wrong. The question sent them into gales of laughter. “Right here, pal,” one of them said, striking a pose that almost made my eyeballs catch fire.
“No, try me!” Another one twisted even more lewdly.
“Now what?” Max said, though he could scarcely have had much doubt.
I did. “I’m not quite sure,” I muttered, and went back to Narbonese: “The ship called the Gamemeno?”
“Oh, the ship,” the trulls chorused, and they giggled some more. That was when I found out what gamemeno means in Lokrian. Why anyone would want to call a ship that…Well, you find peculiar people everywhere. I used to know a Schlepsigian who named his sailboat the Rottweiler because he wrote doggerel aboard it. He had other troubles, too, believe me. One of the strumpets pointed down to the end of the quay. “That’s it.”
That was the only ship tied up at the Quay of the Poxed Trollop. I had feared that would be it and hoped that wouldn’t be. As usual, fear had more weight in the real world. The Gamemeno made the Keraunos look like a potentate’s pleasure yacht. If you’d ever seen the Keraunos, you would know how badly I just insulted the ship Max and I now approached.
A few sailors eyed us as we came up. You know the romantic tales of pirates on the high seas they used to tell? Well, forget them. These fellows looked like pirates, and like the sort of men who gave piracy a bad name in the first place. They hadn’t shaved. They hadn’t bathed. They looked at us the way a dog eyes the meat in a butcher’s window.
The gangplank was down. I went up it, Max right behind me. And I felt like a man who was walking the plank, too. Up close, the Gamemeno looked even grimmer, even more ill-cared-for, than she had at a distance. She took after her crew. By the look of them, someone should have taken after them-with a club.
“You sail for Shqiperi soon, is it not so?” I asked in Hassocki, the language I knew that I thought these cutthroats most likely to speak.
“Who wants to know?” asked the biggest and ugliest of them-a dubious distinction indeed. He wore the ugliest hat, too.
Before I could say anything, Max brandished his sword. Max was bigger than the sailor, though not uglier. He still had both ears, for instance. And he had a great load of righteous indignation in his voice as he exclaimed, “Have a care how you speak to the king!”
“The king?” The sailor-he turned out to be the captain-must have thought Max was a madman. Telling someone six feet eight with a sword in his hand that he’s a madman, however, requires that you be a madman yourself. What he did say was, “Why, thou most credulous fool, the Land of the Eagle has no king.”
“A horse’s cock up thine arse, thou loggerheaded and unpolished wretch, for assuredly it has one now,” Max replied. “Behold him!”
The fellow beheld me. If I seemed royal to him, he conc
ealed it remarkably well. Laughing a laugh he’d surely bought secondhand from a carrion crow, he said, “He’s no more king than he can kick the hat off my head.”
Max bowed to me. “Your Majesty?”
I bowed to him. Then I walked up to the sailor, measured him with my eyes-he was an inch or two taller than I was-and bowed to him as well. “At your service,” I said-and threw myself into a backflip. When my feet were over my head, I kicked out with one of them, caught the brim of the hat without kicking him in the face (too bad!), and sent it flying to the filthy deck. I landed on both feet, straightened up, and bowed to him again. “At your service,” I repeated. “And you, I trust, at mine.”
He stared at me. He stared at Max. He stared at Max’s sword. And he stared at his disreputable hat. He picked it up and jammed it back down onto his equally disreputable head. “I don’t know what your game is, your Majesty”-he freighted that with enough irony to sink it-“but I’ll play along. Aye, we sail for Shqiperi. Would you honor us with your company?”
“I would,” I said grandly-even royally. And so I set forth for my kingdom.
V
I expected the Gamemeno to have a weatherworker who made the poor drunken blundering idiot aboard the Keraunos look like a genius of thaumaturgy. I wondered what would be wrong with him. Mere drunkenness didn’t seem nearly enough. Would he smoke hashish? Would he be haunted by a parrot’s ghost that sat on his shoulder, invisible except by the light of the full moon, and croaked words of evil omen into his unwashed ear? Would he decide he was a dolphin and had to swim in the sea instead of standing on the poop deck? Only a fluke, or the lack of two, would save us from being stuck with the world’s wind.
I turned out to be as right as a blizzard is black, which is one of the things we say in Schlepsig. They don’t know much about blizzards down in Lokris, though they do in the mountains of Shqiperi. To give myself what due I can, I realized I’d made a mistake as soon as I set eyes on this fellow. Except for being swarthy and sharp-featured, he reminded me of nothing so much as the officer candidates at the royal military academy in Donnerwetter. He was all business. I don’t think I’d ever seen a Lokrian who was all business before. I didn’t know such a breed existed.
He nodded to Max and me, said, “Good morning,” in perfect Schlepsigian, and started talking with the captain (whose name, I’d found out, was Tasos). Tasos might have been as snotty as a two-year-old with a cold to us, but he bent over backward (or maybe Lokrians bend over forward-I don’t know) to stay friendly with his weatherworker. Well, we were just passengers. He’d have to work with the other man again and again.
And there was more to it than that. I saw why pretty cursed quick, too. Speaking of cursed, Tasos swore in half a dozen languages when he ordered his bandits to cast off the lines that held the Gamemeno to the Quay of the Poxed Trollop and set sail. I understood most of the bad language. The Lokrian I had to figure out from what the sailors did.
As soon as the lines were coiled on deck and the sails unfurled, the weatherworker-his name, I learned a little later, was Stagiros-got down to that business of his. I thought the sailors had spread too much canvas, not just for the size of their tub but for the likely powers of their weatherworker. Well, shows what I know, doesn’t it?
Eliphalet and Zibeon, doesn’t it just! Stagiros summoned up a mighty wind, a wind that could have taken a Schlepsigian ship of the line into battle against Albion. The sails here didn’t sag and belly and slowly fill. No, not this time. They went taut all at once-boom!-and the Gamemeno left the Quay of the Poxed Trollop behind as fast as you’d want to leave a poxed trollop behind, or even a poxed trollop’s behind.
The pace we set! There were Lokrian Navy ships in Lakedaimon harbor, frigates and schooners and sloops built for speed. Naturally, those ships are going to have good weatherworkers aboard them, to get the most from their sleek lines. We showed ’em our probably poxed behind, and I mean with ease. The way things looked from our deck, somebody might have nailed them to the water. I’d never seen such weatherworking in my whole life.
What was a weatherworker like that doing on a ship like this? I couldn’t ask Tasos in quite those words, not unless I wanted him to pitch me over the side. So I asked, “How did you find such a fine man?” and pointed toward the busily incanting Stagiros.
“I paid him more than anyone else,” he answered without the least hesitation.
Was that sarcasm? I examined it up, down, and sideways, and decided it wasn’t. No, he meant every word, all right. This from a man who plainly clung limpetlike to every hemidemilepta he saw. Why?
More often than you’d think, asking the question makes the answer come. Why would Tasos and the Gamemeno want a weatherworker who had to be one of the best in the world? Because they needed to go from hither to yon and to get out of ports like a scalded cat? Why else would you want a weatherworker like that?
And why would you need to be able to run and scoot, to need it so badly that you had a first-rate man on a fifth-rate ship? I almost asked Tasos what he was smuggling, but that was a question I could ask myself, not one that would make me loved by our swashbuckling captain (ha!) and his jolly crew (ha! ha!).
I could legitimately notice we were sailing along to the southwest, not eastward as a lot of ships heading for Shqiperi from Lakedaimon would have done. “You care not for the canal?” I asked.
The Trans-Peninsular Canal is one of those places that almost have an ancient history behind them. The ancient Lokrians, not being blind, noticed that the secondary peninsula where a lot of them lived was connected to the rest of the much bigger Nekemte Peninsula only by a skinny little neck of land-a neck rather like that belonging to the present Hassockian Atabeg, as a matter of fact. They also noticed they would have themselves a demon of a shortcut if they cut through it.
One small problem: they couldn’t. That was partly because the project needed cooperation, and the Lokrians gave the world examples of how not to cooperate, as they did of so many other important things. And it was partly because the ancient Lokrians, while brilliant in any number of ways, were, when you get right down to it, pretty lousy wizards.
And so were the Aeneans. When it came to sorcery, as with most things, the Aeneans learned everything they didn’t know from the Lokrians. Even so, Emperor Otho had a crack at it. He assembled half the wizards in the Empire and about a quarter of the men who could carry a shovel, and they all converged on the little neck that separated the small peninsula from the bigger one. And they got started, and they went along for a couple of furlongs…
And Otho got bored.
Otho was good at getting bored. He was better at that than at most other things, though he did love his mother (which is another story, one you can look up for yourself). And so he went off and decided he was going to be a sprinter or a boxer or a god or whatever he felt like being instead of a fellow in charge of a canal. Or rather, part of a canal. A small part of a canal. The money stopped coming in. So did the food. The wizards went home. Some of the diggers did, too. Quite a few of them starved. Nobody knows just how many, because Otho was too bored to count them.
For almost the next two thousand years, nobody bothered with the canal. The Aeneans had tried and failed, so other people said it couldn’t be done. Then, about thirty years ago, a Narbonese company had a go of it with modern magery. They got about halfway and ran out of money. A Lokrian firm bought them out and finished the job. It took two modern companies twelve years to dig that canal, with proper wizardry to placate the local earth elementals and stabilize the bedrock elementals (the Aeneans had never even heard of, or from, them). No wonder Otho couldn’t hack it…through.
Tasos, I’m sure, cared as much for the history of the Trans-Peninsular Canal as he did for the history of the rutabaga. Whether he went through it or not was the only thing that mattered to him. “No, we will round Lokris instead,” he told me. “We have certain…stops to make along the way.”
“Uh-huh. I see,” I said. And
I did. I wondered what he’d be loading and unloading at those stops. Spirits flavored with anise? Tobacco flavored with anise? Hemp flavored with anise? Wanted criminals? Criminals looking to do something wicked enough to make them wanted? A black wizard or two? Crossbow quarrels? Copies of the Scriptures done into modern Lokrian? Anything that was expensive but didn’t take up much room fit his bill just fine.
Like Max and me, for instance. Considering what he’d gouged us for a cabin to Fushe-Kuqe, we had to be at least as valuable as a few jugs of dragon spit. That was about how Tasos treated us, too-as cargo, I mean. As long as we didn’t rattle around and cause him extra work, we were fine. If we did…Well, that might not be so much fun.
I just stood by the rail and watched the land and sea flash by. Fishing boats that worked by the world’s wind bobbed in the water. Men with bushy eyebrows under short-brimmed black wool caps stared at us as we shot past. They were almost no sooner seen than gone. Stagiros really was amazing. Did he know how much he was worth? Could a shabby smuggler like Tasos possibly pay him that much? I found it hard to believe, but here he was.
The Gamemeno’s skipper posted a man at the bow to sing out warnings when we neared other vessels. Those fishing boats couldn’t move fast enough to get out of our way. Some of them, with their sails furled and with nets in the water, couldn’t move at all. We had to do the dodging.
As for Tasos himself, he kept a weather eye-I think that’s the proper seagoing phrase, isn’t it?-on the coast to our left. To port, I should say, shouldn’t I? “What are you looking for?” I asked innocently. “Pirates?”
He jerked. He twitched. He grabbed my arm. “Where?” he demanded. “What do you know? What have you heard?”
I didn’t know anything, not about pirates. I didn’t even suspect anything, and I certainly hadn’t heard anything. Well, no-all that wasn’t quite true. Now I knew one thing about pirates, anyway: our magnificent captain was scared green of them. “Why are you worrying?” I asked him. “With your wonderful weatherworker there, you can outrun any pirate ship ever hatched.”
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