“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 concealed 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!).