Several hours still lay between me and sunset. I suppose I could have begun in broad daylight, but that might have scandalized the harem girls. And, as I soon discovered, a king’s life is not an idle one. Anyone would think a man with a crown on his head ran a kingdom or something.

No sooner had Zogu departed the palace, his belt pouch clinking with silver, than Skander came up to me and said, “Your Majesty, Barisha of Belagora would have speech with you.”

“Oh, he would, would he?” I said. About the only people less welcome in the throne room would have been Count Rappaport and a dentist. But Skander nodded. I didn’t suppose I could summarily dismiss the representative of my northern neighbor, however much I wanted to. With a sigh, I nodded. “Let him advance and be recognized.”

Recognizing Barisha, I must confess, was seldom a problem. Each uniform he wore was more garish than the last. This one was of thick, shimmering blue silk, with a gold sash running from northeast to southwest. I wondered if he’d won it from Jean-Jacques-Pierre-Roland at dice. Medals and ribbons bedizened his chest. I also wondered what they were. The Belagoran Award for Gloriously Getting Up on Time Two Days Running? The Grand Star of the Illustrious Order of Horse-leeches? The Medal for Proficiency in Stealing Chickens, Second Class? I shook my head. Barisha, no doubt, was a first-class chicken thief.

All the medals clanked and jingled as he grudged me a bow. “Your Majesty,” he said, and then, even more grudgingly, “My congratulations on your accession.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope Shqiperi and Belagora long remain at peace.”

“May Zibeon grant it be so.” Even Barisha’s agreement was insulting. He rubbed Halim Eddin’s nose in his following the Two Prophets rather than the Quadrate God. And, though he didn’t know it, he rubbed Otto of Schlepsig’s nose in his following Zibeon rather than Eliphalet.

Because I had to be Halim Eddin and not Otto, I rubbed back as a proper worshiper of the Quadrate God would have: “North and south, east and west, let peace prevail.”

“In the south, in the east, in the west, peace will indeed prevail, as far as Belagora is concerned,” Barisha said. “In the north…In the north, your Majesty, we do not recognize the border the Powers have declared. Now that the Hassockian Empire has lost the Nekemte Wars, that border should and must become more rational.”

“By which you mean more the way you want it,” I said sourly.

“But of course.” He was a very smug and self-satisfied chicken thief-he didn’t even take the trouble to deny it.

“This is my land now. You may not steal it,” I said.

“How do you propose to stop us?” he sneered. “I told you before-we have the men on the ground. Tremist will be ours, and soon.”

“Hassocki soldiers still in Shqiperi will obey me,” I said. Barisha went right on sneering. I added, “And we will create a proper Shqipetari army as soon as possible.” I had some hope he would take that seriously. Shqiperi had no true soldiers except for what was left of the Hassocki garrisons-no denying that. But the custom of the blood-feud means every male Shqipetar who shaves goes around armed all the time. I’d never seen so much deadly hardware on display as I did here.

Barisha remained unimpressed. “And what hero from ancient days has been reborn to command your fearsome host?” he inquired.

That question struck much too close to the bone. Most Shqipetari acknowledge one master and one master only: themselves. This makes them excellent raiders, excellent ambushers, excellent hunters-and terrible soldiers. Men in an army need to act together. Shqipetari do as they bloody well please. They might obey a hero from ancient days-or they might decide he was an old fool and ignore him, too. Any modern leader would have his hands full.

Even more than in the rest of the world, in the Nekemte Peninsula to back down is to admit weakness. If I yielded so much as a clod of Shqipetari soil to Barisha, he would be back demanding more day after tomorrow. Vlachia and Lokris would scream for their share, or more than their share, too. Other kingdoms would want to do the same, but only those three border Shqiperi. Well, I suppose the Torinans would take a seaside bite, too. And so…

“The old border will stand,” I said.

“It will not,” Barisha answered.

“We shall resist with force any attempt to change it,” I said.

“We do not seek to change it. We seek to set it right.” Barisha proved himself a hypocrite and a liar in the same breath-no mean accomplishment.

“If you do not take your soldiers back across the old border, we will make them sorry,” I said.

Barisha bowed. “What is ours is ours.”

“And what is ours is also yours? Is that what you are saying, your Excellency?”

“I am saying the Hassocki soldiers still in Tremist occupy land that should always have belonged to Belagora. We must correct this unjust and immoral situation.”

“And I must tell you that it looks fitting and proper to me,” I answered. “We shall not let our kingdom be abridged before it is well begun. The old Hassocki province of Shqiperi, on whose borders the Powers have agreed, shall be the new Kingdom of Shqiperi, and there is nothing more to be said.”

“Oh, but there is,” Barisha said. “For one thing, your Majesty, your so-called kingdom is a joke, a land full of goatherds and cattle rustlers. For another, Belagora has its legitimate rights, and will protect them by force of arms as necessary.”

I remembered my earlier ruminations on Barisha’s medals, and a joke I’d once heard. “Do you know how to make Belagoran chicken stew, your Excellency?” I asked.

Barisha’s bushy eyebrows made his frown something less than a thing of beauty. “Why, no,” he said-he made an admirable straight man.

“First, steal a chicken…” I began.

He turned a color no doctor would have cared to see in a man of his age and weight. “You insult me! You insult my kingdom!”

“You enjoy it more when you insult mine, don’t you? Well, I am here to tell you that that arrow can shoot both ways,” I said. “And I am also here to tell you that we will fight you if you do not withdraw. Is that plain enough, or should I draw you pretty pictures to color in?”

Barisha went an even less appealing shade of purple. It clashed badly with his uniform. Before I could point this out to him, he said, “Do you presume-do you dare-to threaten the mighty Kingdom of Belagora with war?”

“I dare not to be redundant, which is more-or rather, less-than you can say,” I answered. “And if you want a war in the north, you can have it. I don’t just threaten Belagora with war. I declare war on your robbers’ nest of a kingdom. As of this moment, your not very Excellency, you are persona non grata in Shqiperi.” I raised my voice to a shout: “Skander!”

He appeared as if from a trap door. “Your Majesty?”

“Give this person”-I pointed at Barisha with the index finger of my left hand, an insult Skander understood and the Belagoran, unfortunately, didn’t-“a horse, and aim him in the direction of his kingdom. If he is not out of Shqiperi in three days’ time, let him be declared fair game.”

From what I knew of the Shqipetari, there was at least an even-money chance they wouldn’t wait three days to descend on Barisha. From the look on his face, he knew the same thing. He did his best to bluster: “I shall return to this piddlepot hole in the ground at the head of an army that darkens the sun with-”

“The flies that hover over it,” I finished for him. “If you Belagorans bathed once in a while, you’d have fewer troubles along those lines.”

Barisha must have had some chameleon in him, probably on his mother’s side. He did a very creditable imitation of an eggplant. “Let it be war, then!” he cried, and stormed away.