Another difference between civilization and Shqiperi that I’ve already noted is, people were haggling wherever you looked. When I went on the road, I needed a while to understand this. In Schlepsig, there is a price. That is the price. The seller tells you what it is. You pay, or you don’t. This is the natural way, the sensible way, to do business.

It’s not the way they do business in the Nekemte Peninsula. There is no deal in those parts without a dicker. The seller would be offended if you took his first offer. He would think you despised him, or he would think he set his price much too low. Since no one ever takes a first offer, his honor and his sense of his own cleverness meet no danger.

In Shqiperi, where every man usually carries as many weapons as he can afford and as many as he can wear and still walk, dickering takes on a whole new dimension. A bargainer will think nothing of drawing a dagger or swinging a sword or letting the flat of an axe blade crash down on a tabletop. Shqipetari treat a haggle like the prelude to a blood feud. Every now and then, it is.

So when Max and I saw-and heard-a knot of shouting, gesticulating people in the market square, we didn’t think much of it, not at first. Shqipetari shout and gesticulate as naturally as Schlepsigians take orders. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything; it’s just part of who they are. It doesn’t necessarily not mean anything, either, though, as I was about to discover.

In fact, Max, being so uncouthly tall, discovered it before I did. He could peer over the crowd and discover why it was a crowd. I had to peer through people, which is harder; they refuse to go transparent when you most want them to.

“Uh, your Majesty, we have a problem here,” he said.

“What kind of problem?” I asked. The Shqipetari not only stubbornly stayed opaque but got more excited by the minute. And they said it couldn’t be done!

“You know the emblem of this kingdom?” Now Max, Eliphalet bless his pointed little head, was being opaque, too.

I thought of the bicephalous eagle (made in Albion) tacked up behind my makeshift throne. “Personally, no,” I answered, but I was wrong.

Max proceeded to point this out: “If that emblem were a man, he’d be in the middle of that crowd right now.”

A horrid suspicion ran through me. “Tell me anything you please, O most excellent Minister for Special Affairs, anything at all. But north and south, east and west”-even in my extremity, I did remember not to swear by the Two Prophets-“tell me that’s not Josй-Diego in there.”

But it was, or they were, depending on how you look at things. Dooger and Cark’s flyers went right on showing a two-headed man, even though we didn’t have one in the company any more. Josй-Diego was the one we didn’t have any more. The reason we didn’t have him-them?-any more was that the two heads couldn’t get along with each other, not even a little bit, which meant he, or they, didn’t have an act.

I finally got my own glimpse of him, them, whatever. He, they, whatever, hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I saw him/them. Josй, the right-hand head, wore a full beard. Because he did, Diego was clean-shaven. Diego, the left-hand head, let his curly brown hair fall almost to his shoulders-I mean, shoulder. Because he did, Josй shaved his scalp. Just to make matters worse, Josй controlled their left arm and leg, Diego their right, and not the other way around. Sometimes they-he?-couldn’t even walk, because the right leg didn’t know what the left leg was doing.

It gets worse. Josй was a reactionary. Diego was a radical. Josй ate meat-adored it. Diego was a vegetarian. Josй liked girls. Diego liked boys. Whether they ever managed to make like lucky Pierre, I’m afraid-or rather, glad-I can’t tell you.

And it gets even worse than that, because Josй-Diego saw me, too. Actually, I suspect Josй-Diego saw Max first. Max is almost as noticeable as Josй-Diego, and under some circumstances even more so. And after the two-headed man spotted Max, he didn’t need long to spot me with him. He waved to us and headed our way.

That was about as bad as it could get. He knew we were Otto of Schlepsig and Max of Witte. He didn’t know we were supposed to be King Halim Eddin and his more or less faithful aide-de-camp, Captain Yildirim. He knew we followed the Two Prophets. Josй followed them, too, with the fanatical devotion of most Leonese. Diego was a freethinker. Neither of them knew we were affecting to reverence the Quadrate God. Even if for different reasons, they both would have been appalled.

Giving Josй and Diego something to agree about was not what I had in mind.

“What are you fellowth doing in thith Prophetth-forthaken plathe?” Diego asked. Yeth, uh, yes, he talked like that. No, he wasn’t being effeminate. Josй spoke Schlepsigian with the same lisping Leonese accent. Josй was a lot of things, starting with bad-tempered fool and rapidly going downhill from there, but no one would ever accuse him of effeminacy.

Max did his best to tip Josй-Diego off to what we were doing. Drawing himself up to his full height-which takes a lot of drawing-he spoke in severe tones: “Have a care how you address Halim Eddin, King of Shqiperi.”

That got both heads’ attention, but not in the way we wanted. “Whose leg are you pulling, Max?” Josй asked. I’m not going to write the lisp any more. I’m just not. But it was there. You can hear it in your mind’s eye, if you want to, or see it in your ear.

“Otto’s no more a king than I am,” Diego added.

“You’re no king. You’re a cursed queen,” Josй said. I told you they didn’t get along.

They switched from Schlepsigian to Leonese about then. I don’t really speak Leonese, but I do speak Narbonese and Torinan, which are its cousins, so I can follow it after a fashion. Diego said something rude about Josй’s mother, which is strange, since she was Diego’s mother, too. Josй said something very rude about the only kind of meat Diego ate. Diego screeched and tried to hit him. Josй blocked the punch.

The crowd watched in fascination. As long as the two heads were shouting at each other-as long as Josй-Diego was shouting at himself?-in Leonese, everything was fine, or near enough. Hardly any Shqipetari understand it. But if and when Josй-Diego went back to Schlepsigian, all my troubles came back, too. Even in Peshkepiia, which is every bit as Prophets-forsaken as Josй-Diego said (why else would he, or they, have ended up there?), quite a few people know Schlepsigian, the language of Culture.

Josй stamped on Diego’s foot. That didn’t do either one of them any good, since they both felt it. They howled the polyglot curses anyone who’s done time in a circus uses.

Josй did go back to Schlepsigian, and I felt like cursing him. “Seriously, Otto, what are you doing here?” he asked.

And then, at my elbow, someone spoke to me in Hassocki: “Excuse me, your Majesty, but is this, uh, person bothering you?”

May I turn into a Shqipetar if it wasn’t the sergeant of the guard. He and his men had put Mustafa and Kemal away, and then they’d come after me to make sure I was all right. Such devotion is touching; it almost made me wish I really were Halim Eddin. “He’s…getting there,” I answered. “Tell me-do you or any of your men speak Schlepsigian?”

“No, your Majesty,” the sergeant said. “I’m sorry, your Majesty.”

“Don’t be,” I told him.

Josй-Diego gave me two suspicious stares. “What are you yattering about, Otto?” Josй said irritably. It wasn’t just Diego he couldn’t get along with; he had trouble with the whole world. “Talk a language a thivilithed man can underthtand.”

“He’th going to thcrew uth,” Diego thaid-uh, said. I said I wouldn’t do that any more, didn’t I? Well, I’m trying. “He’s going to screw us to the wall.” There, that’s better.

And I did aim to screw them to the wall, too. I’ll tell you something else-I enjoyed doing it metaphorically much more than I would have enjoyed it physically. I nodded to the sergeant. “This fellow is a troublemaker, I’m afraid. Why don’t you take him, uh, them, to the dungeon to cool down for a while?”