Would you give a dog a woodcut of a bone?

The famous Lokrian sun and sky don’t translate well in descriptions, either. All I can tell you is they don’t make weather like that in Schlepsig, and I wish they did. It was warm without being sticky. The sky was a deeper, purer blue than my home kingdom ever knows. Up at the top of Fortress Hill, you thought you could see all the way to the edge of the world. Yes, I know the world hasn’t got an edge. You thought you could see it anyway.

Even Max was moved. He took off his hat, fanned himself with it, and said, “Nice view.” He really did.

And yet like I told you, you hardly see any Lokrians up there. Oh, they have a few guards, to keep you from sticking a temple in your hip pocket and taking it back to your hotel, but that’s about all. Wait-I take it back. There was also a Lokrian woman up there. Her lines were almost as fine as the temples’, and she dressed to emphasize them. Her eyes were dark as two sloes, but it was obvious she was fast.

“Is it that you speak Narbonese?” one of my fellow foreigners asked her, tipping his hat. After seeing so much marble, he was after something livelier.

He got it, too. She gave him a slow, sidelong smile. “Sir, my mouth will do anything you like,” she purred in the same language. After that, he couldn’t take her down off Fortress Hill fast enough. I only wished I’d spoken to her first. By the way Max’s eyes followed her, he was wishing the same thing. No, he wasn’t wishing that I’d spoken to her first… Oh, you know what I mean.

Now we both looked around for something of more recent vintage and softer curves than the famous stonework. We were out of luck, though. That miserable Narbonese seemed to have snagged the only woman of, ah, enterprise who’d gone up there that morning. No wonder we’re hereditary foes with Narbonensis, by Eliphalet’s whiskers.

Since Max and I had no pleasant excuse to go back to Papa Ioannakis’, we tramped every inch of Fortress Hill. I got a little piece of classical marble in my shoe, and had to park my fundament on a bigger one so I could take off the shoe and shake out the pebble. It fell to the ground with a tiny click-a bit of ancient history returning to anonymity.

Max, meanwhile, was peering down into the city. “Something’s going on down there,” he said.

“Well, so what?” I said. “Lakedaimon’s a fair-sized town. Why shouldn’t something be going on?”

“No, not something like that,” he said. “Something nasty.”

Now, Max’s imagination can turn a wedding parade into a funeral procession. I’ve seen him do it. Actually, it’s impressive, if you like that kind of thing. So before I believed him, I stood up and had a look for myself. Damned if he wasn’t right. When people start chasing one another through the streets with clubs and spears and crossbows, something’s come unglued somewhere.

Yes, we’d landed in Lakedaimon just in time for the Scriptural Riots. Thank you so much, Thunderbolt.

Everybody in the civilized world knows the Scriptures were first written in ancient Lokrian. Some sarcastic sage said a few years ago that the Goddess learned Lokrian just so She could write the Scriptures-and learned it very badly, too. But, while everybody knows this, nobody-nobody normal, I mean, leaving priests and sages out of the bargain-thinks about it more than once every five years, if that often. If you want to read the Scriptures, you read them in your own language. If you’re feeling especially holy and you’ve got more schooling than is good for you, you’ll look at them in Aenean.

But if you happen to be a Lokrian…If you happen to be a Lokrian, you read the Scriptures in ancient Lokrian. There’s only one problem with that. Modern Lokrian is closer to ancient Lokrian than Torinan, say, is to Aenean. But it’s not a whole lot closer. If you know modern Lokrian, you can sorta, kinda read the ancient language, with the accent on sorta, kinda.

So somebody got the bright idea of finally-Lokris kicked out the Hassocki a long lifetime ago-translating the Scriptures into modern Lokrian. And he published his book. On the day we were there, he published his miserable book. If we’d sailed away in the Halcyon, we never would have had to worry about it. If the Keraunos’ weatherworker’d been sober, we never would have had to worry about it. The weatherworker was drunk. We didn’t get to sail. We had to worry about it.

I have no idea whether this fellow’s translation was good, bad, or indifferent, mind you. I read even less Lokrian than I speak, and I don’t speak any. What I do know is that half the people in Lakedaimon seemed to think he was a hero, and the other half wanted to dip him in boiling butter-or, being Lokrians, possibly in olive oil instead.

I know all this now, you understand. I’ve pieced it together from journal articles and such. What I knew then was that way too many people in long skirts and short ones were running around assaulting one another with intent to maim, or maybe to dip in boiling butter. Somehow, I didn’t think they would refrain from mayhem on my person just because my clothes said I was no Lokrian. If anything, both factions might decide that kicking in a foreigner’s ribs was the one pleasure they had in common.

“How are we going to get back to the hostel?” Max asked. “They already seem pretty hostile down there.”

In lieu of braining him with a chunk of classical marble, I nodded. “Don’t they just?” I said. “I suggest we go…cautiously.”

“Good luck,” Max said. And we would need it. We were obvious foreigners. I’m a good-sized man, and I seem bigger next to Lokrians, who run short. Max is enormous next to anything this side of a temple steeple. The only way we could have made ourselves more conspicuous was by going naked. The idea did not appeal. We might have got by with it in ancient Lakedaimon, but not now, not now.

The idea of staying up on Fortress Hill didn’t appeal, either. Fortress Hill has some of the most glorious stonework in the world. And that’s all it has. No beds. No cafes. No nothing, unless you felt like chewing rocks. I didn’t. “Let’s try it,” I said. Max made a horrible face, but he didn’t say no.

We had no trouble going down the steps to the bottom of the hill. I knew why, too-the Lokrians didn’t feel like climbing them. There have to be more than there are at the Temple of Siwa, even if those are a lot steeper. But when we got to the bottom…The first thing we saw was a woman’s body. Someone had smashed in her head. Flies buzzed around the pool of blood. Max and I have both been through wars-but there wasn’t supposed to be a war here.

Fine. That poor woman got killed in peacetime. It didn’t make her any less dead.

My nostrils twitched. Then I coughed. You always smell a lot of smoke in a city, from cookfires and hearthfires and what have you. But you don’t get a gust of wind with smoke as thick as if you were smoking six pipes at once. “They’re trying to burn the place down,” Max observed. “That’s clever of them, isn’t it?”

“Brilliant,” I said. If the Hassocki had set fire to Lakedaimon, it would have been a fearsome atrocity. Everybody would have screamed and made them stop. Since the Lokrians were doing it to themselves, everybody would yawn-except for the people who got roasted. They’d scream, all right.

A band of a dozen or so rioters came tearing around a corner and started to rush right at us. They slowed down in a hurry, I must say. The sight of somebody Max’s size will do that to the most riotous rioter.

Max bowed to them. Since he’s so long and lean, he folds up amazingly. As he straightened to show them that, yes, he really was as tall as they thought he was, I bowed in turn. And I kept right on going, turning the bow into a handstand. If I’d been wearing a short skirt like most of the Lokrians, that might have played hob with my modesty. Or it might not-do they have drawers under those things? Trust me: I never tried to find out.