Max turned to the closest sailor, who was staring at him all goggle-eyed. “May I please have a rag?” Max asked in Hassocki. “I want to clean the blade before the blood makes it rust.”

Moving like a man in a trance-and not one caused by the sea serpent-the man handed Max his pocket handkerchief. But Max didn’t have the chance to use it, not right away. Captain Tasos had been standing there on deck, as astonished as any of his sailors. Now he suddenly came back to life. He bellowed like a bull that was suddenly made into a steer and folded Max into an embrace that proved the difficulties of bathing at sea. He almost spitted himself on Max’s sword, but he didn’t notice that. I don’t think Max noticed, either, or he might have made the accident real, not potential.

Tasos bubbled and squeaked in Lokrian, which neither one of us understood. It sounds like sticky wine pouring out of a jug, glub glub glub. After a few paragraphs-like most Lokrians, he liked to hear himself talk-the skipper realized his mistake. He switched to Hassocki: “You are heroic! You are magnificent! You should have been born a Lokrian!”

Max’s editorial eyebrow said two out of three wasn’t bad. I wondered how long it would be, once Captain Tasos had dropped us off at Fushe-Kuqe, before he started claiming he’d wounded (or more likely killed) the fearsome sea serpent. If he needed more than ten days, he had more character than I gave him credit for. He was a character, but not the kind of character whose chief characteristic is character.

I went back to Stagiros. “You did everything you could,” I said quietly in Hassocki. “Everyone knows it.”

The weatherworker shrugged. “It would not have been enough,” he answered in his fluent Schlepsigian. He was a man of parts, was Stagiros. “Everyone also knows that. Your friend was very brave or very foolish.”

I glanced up the deck toward Max. He’d finally managed to disentangle himself from Tasos, with luck without getting his pocket picked in the process. Even the Klephts were congratulating him. This once, in honor of the moment, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Lokris’ southern peninsula is shaped like a hand or a plane-tree leaf or anything else with a broad base and several projections sticking out from it. A few islands only mildly meddle with the simile. Down and around went the Gamemeno. We saw no other sea serpents. Even more to the point, no other sea serpents saw us.

We did see every little cove and inlet along the way, or so it seemed. Something would go off the ship-the Klephts got off at one little inlet. Something would come on. Some silver would stick in Tasos’ pockets, I had no doubts.

One thing-no more coffins came aboard. I don’t know whether other Lokrian vampires had some sharp (one might even say pointed) questions for our intrepid skipper. I would guess not, for they might have found an answer on the order of Well, look inside a sea serpent somewhat less than satisfying. But this is only a guess. All I do know is, no vampires bothered me or Max. That we ate garlic whenever we could, that we festooned our cabin door and porthole with it, that we carried a couple of peeled cloves wherever we went-all this could be merely a coincidence. That we were not inclined to take chances…is nothing but the truth. And can you blame us?

We rounded the last stubby finger or leaf lobe or whatever you please and started up the east coast of the peninsula. We did all this sailing around, remember, instead of just sailing through the canal. If we’d sailed through the canal, Tasos wouldn’t have been able to scatter contraband all over the Lokrian coastline. Max and I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet the vampire or the sea serpent. And we wouldn’t have run into the pirates, either.

The pirates. I was just coming to them. I really was.

Now, the Mykonian Sea has islands the way a dog has fleas. They’re all over everywhere. The Tiberian Sea, between Lokris and Shqiperi and Belagora and the Dual Monarchy on the one hand and Torino on the other, isn’t like that. It has islands, yes, but they all cling to the coastline that runs north from Lokris. Hardly any at all on the Torinan side. I have no answer for why that’s so. Till I started talking about it, I didn’t even know I had a question.

I will say one thing for the islands in the Tiberian Sea. They’re shaggier than the ones farther west. They haven’t had all the trees chopped down, so their mountains have bearded cheeks. Laertes’ son came off one of those islands (Aiaia, it was) back in the ancient days-you know, the fellow whose wanderings were an odyssey in themselves. He was a man who could work wood: remember the bed back in his palace, and remember the boat he built with not much more than an axe and an adze.

Some people say he was a pirate, too. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised. The men who live on those islands nowadays can still work wood with the best of them. And the whoresons are still pirates, too.

Oh, the Lokrian Navy tries. Why, there must be three or four sloops and frigates along the east coast of Lokris that do nothing but hunt pirates…and go after smugglers and keep Shqipetari and Torinan fishing boats out of Lokrian coastal waters and help Lokrian fishermen who get in trouble and go after sea serpents and do a little fishing themselves (the tunny in those waters are very fine) and run cattle and sheep from the islands to the mainland and survey the rocks around the islands and show the Lokrian flag and look impressive.

So there we were, coming up alongside one of those islands-Aiaia itself, as a matter of fact, and making kind of heavy going of it, because the world’s wind lay dead against us. Stagiros was doing everything he could, but when the wind he called up had to fight something not far from a gale, the Gamemeno lost a lot of the speed she’d shown up till then.

We might have been the only ship on the Tiberian Sea trying to make headway against the world’s wind. Some fishing boats sat more or less in one place, their anchors out to hold them there. Others scudded south, using the wind instead of working against it. If they wanted to go north again, they could either tack into the teeth of the gale-which was even slower than what we were doing-or wait till the weather got better.

Tasos didn’t seem altogether displeased. “No one can chase us down,” he said. “The Lokrian Navy has no ship that could chase us down.” The Lokrian Navy certainly had none in those waters. But saying that the Lokrian Navy couldn’t do this or that was like saying a mouse couldn’t have built the wonderful buildings on Lakedaimon’s Fortress Hill. It was true, but so what?

And Tasos, who had such a fine weatherworker, was spoiled by having him. He’d forgotten there were other ways to win a race than by speed alone. He’d forgotten cheating, as a matter of fact, which is an odd thing to have to say about a smuggler. But then, I could say a lot of odd things about Tasos, most of them much less complimentary than that.

I was up at the Gamemeno’s bow, looking ahead toward what would be my kingdom. Oh, I couldn’t see Shqiperi yet, but the Lokrian coastline I could see wouldn’t be a whole lot different. It would have Lokrians and not Shqipetari living on it, but I couldn’t see that from however far out to sea we were.

The winds howled and swirled. I stood right where Stagiros’ wizardly wind faded and the world’s wind grew strong. They fought each other there, now one having the advantage, now the other, now a small twister forming as neither would give way. I hung on to the rail.

A southbound fishing boat darted past us, the four or five men in her staring at us as if amazed we could move in the opposite direction. One of the fishermen pointed back to the north and shouted something. The world’s wind blew his words away. It might almost have been jealous of Stagiros and his skill.