“Here is the strongroom, your Majesty,” Essad Pasha said. It looked strong to me. It had more bars than a harbor district, more bolts than a linen mill, and more locks than all the salmon smokeries in Schlepsig. Essad Pasha produced a key ring and handed it to me. “The first opens the topmost lock.”
One after another, I undid them. One after another, Max opened the bolts and took down the bars. I pulled on the knob. The door silently swung open; the hinges gleamed with grease. Inside stood four stout chests. They were festooned with chains and more locks.
Without even looking at Essad Pasha, I held out my hand. Clank! He handed me another key ring, this one with even more angled and twisted brass on it than the other. He pointed to the chests to show in which order the keys opened the locks. I wasted no time testing them. They passed the test.
My heart pounding, I opened the first chest. It hadn’t moved when I shoved against it. I liked that. Silver is nice and heavy, gold even heavier. Up came the lid. “You see, Your Majesty?” Essad Pasha sounded smug.
I saw, all right. Piasters, leptas, thalers in silver and gold (the Dual Monarchy hasn’t minted gold thalers for a hundred years, but you find them everywhere in the Nekemte Peninsula), krams, dinars, livres also in silver and gold, shillings and florins, a fat silver shekel (with IN THE PROPHETS WE TRUST under the eagle), precious stones…I wanted to chortle like a miser over his fortune. I wanted to run my hands through the money for that sweet clinking-clanking sound. I wanted to jump in the chest and swim around.
Otto of Schlepsig would have, too, by Eliphalet’s strong right arm. Prince Halim Eddin, though-King Halim Eddin, I should say now-would have seen treasures of his own in Vyzance. Since I was supposed to be Halim Eddin, I couldn’t cackle like a laying hen, no matter how much I wanted to. I gave Essad Pasha what I hoped was a calm, serious nod. “I see, your Excellency,” I said…calmly, seriously.
“Examine the other chests, by all means,” Essad Pasha said. “You will see I have not cheated. North and south, east and west, treasure from the whole kingdom is here.”
Any time someone goes out of his way to tell you how honest he is, watch your wallet. I opened the other chests, one by one. Max stirred a couple of them to make sure the money and jewels weren’t hiding rocks or lumps of lead. They weren’t. I’d never seen so much-much-in one place before.
I glanced towards Essad Pasha. He was just a little tighter and tenser than he might have been. “This is very good, your Excellency,” I said. He relaxed, ever so slightly. If he hadn’t, I would have decided I was imagining things. But since he did, I casually asked, “And when do you plan to bring over the rest of it?”
He jerked. I might have stuck him in the rear with a pin. “How did you know?” he said hoarsely. “You showed me you were formidable, but how did you know?”
He wouldn’t have understood if I told him he reminded me of Dooger and Cark. Or if he did, that would have been worse. Dooger and Cark got as much pleasure from cheating a poor performer in their troupe (as if there were any other kind!) out of half a day’s pay as Essad Pasha did from hiding who could guess how much treasure. Essad Pasha got more money, though.
“Have I not lived in Vyzance?” I said, trying to sound indulgent and amused. “Have I not seen ministers? North and south, east and west, will ministers not try to line their own pockets when they can?” Then I wasn’t so amused any more. “This is all very well, as long as they realize the game has an end. We have come to the end, Essad Pasha. Bring the rest of the treasury here within the hour. If you hold out on me this time, your story will not have a happy ending.”
There was, I judged, at least an even-money (and money was indeed at the root of it) chance he could still order me killed and get away with it. Instead, he went to his knees and then to his belly, knocking his forehead on one of those elegant rugs. I’d intimidated him, all right. “Mercy, your Majesty!” he wailed with that wild tremolo only Hassocki can achieve. “Mercy! I meant no harm!”
Certainly not to yourself, I thought. “The sand flows through the glass, your Excellency,” I said. “I suggest you make haste.”
“Yes, your Majesty! Of course, your Majesty!” Essad Pasha was all but babbling.
I discovered I liked Yes, your Majesty! even better than Yes, your Highness! “Captain Yildirim!” I said.
“Yes, your Majesty?” Max said. Oh, I did like that!
“Please accompany his Excellency to the fortress and make sure everything goes smoothly when my soldiers bring the rest of the treasury back here,” I said. They were, in fact, Essad Pasha’s soldiers. But as long as I gave him no chance to remember that and do something about it, I was fine. (And, if the first King of Shqiperi came down with an acute case of loss of life not for being proved an impostor but for acting every inch a king, Essad Pasha would have a demon of a time finding anybody else to play the part. So I told myself, anyhow.)
Max saluted. A Hassocki drill sergeant would have screamed at him. Like any other critics, drill sergeants scream whether the performance rates screaming or not. Essad Pasha noticed nothing amiss, and he was the only audience that mattered. “Yes, your Majesty!” There! Max said it again!
Off they went. I turned to the Shqipetari flunky. “What’s your name?” I asked him.
“I am Skander, your Majesty,” he replied.
“Well, Skander, let’s get these chests locked up.” I handed him some of the keys as I continued, “We’ll leave the strongroom open till Captain Yildirim comes back with the rest of the treasure. Once it’s closed up again, I would like to meet the women of the harem.” Again, I didn’t want to sound as if I were drooling on the carpet. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin would have had plenty of women with whom to amuse himself. Back in Vyzance, Prince Halim Eddin no doubt still did. Here in Peshkepiia, so did I.
Skander bowed. “Hearkening and obedience, your Majesty.” There was even a step up from Yes, your Majesty! Who would have imagined such a wonderful thing? Skander went on, “The chief eunuch says your ladies are also eager to meet you. Naturally, I have not presumed to enter the women’s quarters myself.”
“Naturally,” I agreed in what were probably abstracted tones. Halim Eddin would be used to eunuchs. His household doubtless had several. He wouldn’t have the urge to clutch at himself at the mere thought of the most unkindest cut of all. And, because I was he, I wouldn’t either. Or, if I did, I wouldn’t show it.
We waited. After a bit, Skander called to a lesser servant and spoke to him in Shqipetari. The underling nodded and hurried off. He came back with a tray with a large goblet and a small one. Skander took the small one, leaving the larger one for me. “Fruit juice, your Majesty,” he said. “Improved fruit juice.”
Did I need a food taster? In Vyzance, Halim Eddin probably did. As the Hassockian Atabeg’s nephew, he was lucky to have lived long enough to grow up. Here, I didn’t think I did. Murder in Shqiperi looked to be very straightforward. The sword, the knife, the crossbow quarrel-those were worries. Poison? No.
Skander politely waited for me to drink first. I raised the goblet. “Your good fortune, and Shqiperi’s,” I said, and sipped. I had all I could do not to cough. They’d, ah, improved that fruit juice with strong spirits till it had hair on its chest. I flicked out a drop with my little finger.
“Your Majesty is pious.” Skander imitated my gesture. He didn’t bat an eye when he drank.
“Have we got a court wizard?” I asked.
“How could we, your Majesty?” he said. “Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have a court.”
“We’ll have to do something about that,” I said. “How many wizards are there in Peshkepiia?”
“Always plenty of hedge-wizards,” Skander said. That was true. It was true everywhere. It was also useless: what one hedge-wizard could make, another could unmake. He went on, “Wizards of a quality to serve your Majesty? Perhaps four, perhaps half a dozen.”
That was perhaps two, perhaps four, more than I’d expected. Sk
ander probably had lower standards than I did. Were his standards lower than Halim Eddin’s? There I wasn’t so sure. In the past hundred years, wizards from Schlepsig and Albion, from Narbonensis and Torino, and from Vespucciland across the sea have turned the world upside down and inside out. It’s not the same when we’re old as it was when we were young. Take Consolidated Crystal. In a lifetime, it’s spread everywhere. Now anyone can talk to anyone else. Whether he’ll have anything interesting to say is a different question, worse luck.
“Bring one of these wizards before me in the next few days,” I said. “If he suits me, I’ll use him. If not, we’ll try another.”
Skander bowed. “Of course, your Majesty.”
In about an hour, Max returned with sweating soldiers, with three more treasure chests, and with the keys to open them. When I did, I saw they really were full of money, with the odd bit of jewelry in there for variety’s sake. I could live with variety like that. “Is this the lot of it?” I asked.
“It’s everything Essad Pasha coughed up,” Max answered.
His eyebrows said he thought the local governor had more squirreled away somewhere. Mine said I thought Essad Pasha did, too. But what could I do about it? Short of turning him on a spit over a slow fire and rendering him down for lard-which might get me talked about even if he did yield several gallons-not much. I decided that could wait. Maybe I didn’t have all the treasure in Shqiperi. I had plenty for a thousand ordinary men, plenty even for a king.
Which meant…“The harem,” I said.
“The harem,” Skander agreed.
People who’ve never lived in kingdoms where they follow the Quadrate God have funny notions about harems. Painters-mostly Narbonese-use them as an excuse to paint pretty naked women. Far be it from me to deny that any excuse is a good one, but harem girls don’t lounge around naked all the time. For one thing, it gets cold. For another, the master of the harem mostly isn’t in. Do they show off for each other, then?
In the Hassockian Atabeg’s harem, maybe they do. He has more women than he knows what to do with. Well, no-he knows what to do with them, but with most of them he doesn’t do it very often. He has his favorites. The rest make do with one another, or with the eunuchs. Some eunuchs can keep a woman happy with what they have left, and she never needs to worry about having a baby. The ones who can’t do that have other ways.
But in most harems the women work when they’re not summoned to, ah, entertain. They spin. They sew. They weave. They raise children-and the only people who say that isn’t work are the ones who’ve never done it.
The door to the harem was barred from the outside. The king’s chosen women weren’t about to go off on their own. After I took down the bar and leaned it against the wall, I discovered the door was barred from the inside, too. Nobody was going to sneak in there and fool around, either. Well, I didn’t need to sneak. I knocked on the door: a loud, authoritative knock.
Max coughed. He does that every so often, whether he needs to or not. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it does. You have to know which is which, and how to translate. I had no trouble this time. If you think you’re going to be the only one in there having a good time, you’re out of your tree-that was what he was telling me.
I was tempted to think, Too bad for you, pal. Something told me that wasn’t a good idea. Most plots against kings start with their nearest and allegedly dearest. I couldn’t promise Max his share in Hassocki. Skander would have been scandalized. I couldn’t do it in Schlepsigian, either. Skander would have wondered why I switched languages, and I didn’t know he didn’t know mine. So I tipped Max a wink. That did the job.
The door opened. A eunuch bowed to me. A lot of eunuchs are fat; some are immense. This fellow was skinny enough to make up for three of them. He looked mean-and who could blame him? He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, his voice somewhere in that nameless range between tenor and contralto. “I am Rexhep, your Majesty.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, my good Rexhep,” I said. My good Rexhep’s eyes, black as the inside of a bear, said he wasn’t one bit pleased to make my acquaintance. “I have come to meet the women of my household.”
“Of course, your Majesty,” Rexhep said, while those glowing black eyes said something else altogether. I got the feeling Rexhep couldn’t do a woman any good with whatever equipment he had left. Was that why he looked mean? Lots of people are curious about such things. Me, some details I’d rather not know.
I walked through the door. The eunuch closed it after me. He barred it from his side, and I heard Skander bar it from the other. I knew that was the custom, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck anyhow. Was I King of Shqiperi or a prisoner?
As long as I acted like a king, I was one. If I’d learned anything coming from Dooger and Cark’s Traveling Emporium of Marvels in Thasos to the royal harem in Peshkepiia, that was it. When people think you believe it, they’ll believe it, too. If you want to tell me I’m wrong, think about Essad Pasha. He’d fought Vlachia and Belagora to a standstill, to say nothing of running a province full of Shqipetari for years. But he knocked his head on the ground to a down-at-the-heels Schlepsigian acrobat-because he thought I was a king.
Then there was Count Rappaport. The less said about him, the better. So I won’t.
Inside the harem, the air smelled of sandalwood and cinnamon and rosewater and spikenard and musk. Just breathing was enough to make your heart race. Poor Rexhep! Even if his heart did race, much good it did him. We turned a corner. There on couches set in a grassy courtyard waited the women Essad Pasha and his underlings had chosen for their king.
Before I set eyes on them, I thought they might be beauties who would dazzle me with their exotic loveliness. Then again, they were Shqipetari. The old joke goes, first prize is a week in Shqiperi; second prize is two weeks in Shqiperi. Maybe they wouldn’t be worth seeing at all.
Truth dwelt in the middle. Truth usually does. One end or the other, those are the places where madness lies. Think of the fools who conjured up a bolt of lightning to murder the last Poglavnik of Tver but one. They thought that would somehow set the peasants free. Or think of some of Count Rappaport’s colleagues, who figured the best way to keep the Dual Monarchy safe was by slaughtering all the Vlachs. From the Vlachs I’ve known, the sentiment has its points, but most of those people haven’t done anything to anybody. So…the middle.
I wouldn’t have minded a couple of dozen ravishing beauties. I wouldn’t even have minded ravishing them. But a couple of dozen hags? I could have done without that.
Some of these women were very pretty indeed. Some weren’t much above plain. I think any man who saw them would have said the same. Some other man might not agree which ones were pretty and which ordinary, though. No doubt about it, there was something here for every taste, or for everyone to taste, or-well, you get the idea.
All of them, pretty and plain alike, wore silk blouses and the baggy bloomers stage shows call harem trousers. In the stage shows, those are as transparent as the tailor can arrange and as the local laws allow. Here, they were of plain cotton-not a smooth thigh or a rounded rump on display. Such is life.
I stood among them and bowed in the four directions. “North and south, east and west, I greet you, my ladies,” I said. “I hope you all speak Hassocki?”
“Yes, your Majesty.” Their voices made a sweet chorus. I looked around to make sure they’d all answered. As far as I could tell, they had. Some of them had strong accents, but that was all right.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rexhep gesture. I don’t think I was supposed to. All the harem girls got down from their divans and prostrated themselves before me. They were a lot more graceful than Essad Pasha. Saying that doesn’t do them enough credit. A few days with a dancemaster and they could have earned their keep in any theater in Schlepsig or Narbonensis or Albion.
“Get up, get up,” I told them. “No need to stand on ceremony here, or even to fall down for i
t.”
Some of them smiled as they straightened. Others looked puzzled. I needed a moment to figure out why. When I did, it made me sad. You’ll always find people who want other people to shout at them and tell them what to do. That way, they don’t have to figure it out for themselves. I’d be lying if I said I understood this-I’ve been making my own way ever since I got old enough to ignore what my mother and father told me, which didn’t take long. I don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Some of the girls wanted a king who’d roar at them the way a mean taverner keeps his barmaids in line.
I wouldn’t have minded roaring at the minister from Belagora. As a matter of fact, I intended to-what else was Barisha for? But I have better things to do with pretty girls (or even with girls not much above plain) than roar at them.
“What are your names?” I asked them.
“Strati.” “Lutzi.” “Hoti.” They rained down on me. I was once in a troupe with a memorious man-Funes, his name was, from Leon. He taught me a few of his tricks: only a few, mind you. I don’t have a memory like his-Eliphalet’s whiskers, who does?-but I’m good with names.
Inside a few minutes, I had them all straight. Pick something about the person and associate it with the name and you won’t go wrong. Strati had straight hair. Lutzi stirred up lust in me-I think she was the prettiest of them. Hoti seemed hot; she dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief. And so on. It isn’t magic, not the kind that uses the laws of similarity and contagion, but it seems sorcerous to people who don’t know how it’s done. Funes was a master. With any kind of stage presence at all, he would have been rich and famous, not a sideshow performer. I don’t have a quarter of his skill, but I can sell what I do.
And the harem girls had to be the easiest audience I ever faced. If I’d roared at them, they would have thought they deserved it. Since I didn’t, they thought I was sweet. They’d never dreamt I would bother learning their names, let alone that I could do it so fast. They crooned and sighed and stared at me as if I’d fallen from heaven.
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