The deck chairs were deck chairs, right down to their gaudy canvas webbing. Park threw himself into one. It complained about his weight. He sighed again. All the alter egos on his wheel of if seemed to run to portliness. They were all losing their hair, too; he put on the hat in a hurry, before the sun seared his scalp.
Soon he forgot sun, humidity, everything: when he studied, he studied hard. And he had a lot of studying to do. He felt like a student dropped into a class the week before exams. Ever since his — actually, Ib Scoglund’s — appointment to the International Court for the continent of Skrelleland the year before, he’d done little but study this world’s languages, history, and legal systems. They were still strange to him, but as soon as he got to Kuuskoo he would have to start using them.
He wished he’d been assigned a case involving the Bretwaldate of Vinland. Its customs were recognizably similar to the ones he’d grown up with. But assigning legal actions to disinterested outsiders made a certain amount of sense. Disinterested, Allister Park certainly was. Nothing like either country involved in this dispute existed in the world he knew.
Tawantiinsuuju was, he gathered from the text in his lap, what the Inca Empire might have become had Spaniards not strangled it in infancy. In this world, though, Arabs and Berbers still ruled Spain. Among other places, Park thought. That was part of the problem he’d have to deal with…
A shadow fell on the book. After a moment, Park looked up. A man was standing by his chair. “You are Judge Scoglund?” he asked in Ketjwa.
“Yes, I am,” Park answered slowly, using the same language. He was just glad he was talking with a man. Men and women used different words for kin and for other things in Ketjwa, and he wasn’t any too familiar with the distaff side of the vocabulary. “Who are you, sir?”
“I am called Ankowaljuu,” the fellow answered. He was in his late thirties, close to Park’s own age, with red-brown skin, straight black hair cut a little below his ears, and a high-cheekboned face dominated by a nose of nearly Roman impressiveness. He wore sandals, a wool tunic, and a black derby hat. “I am tukuuii riikook to the Son of the Sun, Maita Kapak.” At the mention of his ruler’s name, he shaded his eyes with one hand for a moment, as if to shield them from the monarch’s glory.
“Tukuuii riikook, eh?” Park looked at him with more interest than he’d felt before: Ankowaljuu was no ordinary passenger.
“You understand what it means, then?”
“Aye,” Park said. A tukuuii riikook was an imperial inspector, of the secret sort outside the usual chain of command. Most empires had them under one name or another, so the rulers could make sure their regular functionaries were performing as they should. Frowning, the judge went on, “I do not understand why you tell me, though.”
Ankowaljuu smiled, displaying large white teeth. “Shall I speak English, to make sure I am clear?”
“Please do,” Park said with relief. “I am working to learn your tongue, but I am not yet flowing in it.”
“You have the back-of-the-throat sounds, which are most often hardest for Vinlanders to gain,” Ankowaljuu said.
“But to go on: I tell you because I want you to know you may count on me — I speak for myself now, mind you, not for the Son of the Sun — for as long as you have a hand in judging this dealing between my folk and the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Park hoped his voice did not show his sudden hard suspicion. His years in the DA’s office told him no one ever offered anything for nothing. “You must understand I cannot talk with you about this dealing — all the more so because you are a tukuuii riikook, a thane of your emperor.”
“Yes, of course I understand, That you naysay shows your honesty. I must tell you, the Son of the Sun was sorry he gave our quarrel with the Emir to the International Court when he learned the judge would be from Vinland.”
“Why is that?” Park asked again, this time out of genuine curiosity. “My country has little to do with either yours or the Emirate.”
“Because so many Vinlanders are forejudged against Skrellings,” Ankowaljuu said grimly. “But when I came up to New Belfast to find out what sort of man you are, I found his mistrusts were misplaced. No one who has swinked so hard for the ricks of the Skrellings in Vinland could be anything but fair in his judgments.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Park murmured, a little embarrassed at taking credit for work that had actually been Ib Scoglund’s. “I won’t needfully choose for you, either, just because you’re Skrellings, you know.”
Ankowaljuu made a shoving motion, as if to push that idea aside. “I would not reckon anything of the sort. But it is good to know you will not turn against us just because the folk of the Dar al-Harb are incomers to Skrelleland like you Vinlanders.”
“I never thock of that.” Park clapped a hand to his forehead. “This bounds strife is quite embrangled enough without worries of that sort.”
“So it is.” Ankowaljuu chuckled, a bit unpleasantly. “At least I need not trouble myself about any faithly forejudgment on your part. As a one-time Christian bishop, no doubt you will have glick scorn for the Emir and his Allah on the one hand and our hallowing of the sun and Patjakamak who put it in the sky on the other.”
“I think all faiths can be good,” Park said.
Ankowaljuu’s eloquent grunt showed just how much he believed that. The funny thing was, Park really meant it. Anyone who wanted to play politics in New York had to feel, or at least act, that way. And nothing in Park’s experience with criminals had shown him that people who followed any one religion behaved conspicuously better than those who believed in another.
Trouble was, both the Tawantiinsuujans and the Emir’s subjects took their religions so damned seriously. “Dar al-Harb” itself meant “Land of War”-war against the pagans the Moors of Cordova had found when they crossed to what Park still sometimes thought of as Brazil. Since all the Skrellings in the southern half of Skrelleland were pagan, the past few hundred years had seen a lot of war.
“Well, maybe this is one war we’ll stop,” he muttered.
He didn’t know he had spoken aloud until Ankowaljuu said, “I hope we do.” The tukuuii riikook raised a hand to the brim of his derby and walked off.
Park opened his book to the place his thumb had been keeping. Religion, politics, greed… embrangled wasn’t nearly a strong enough word for this case. A word that was came to mind, but not one suited for polite company. He said it anyhow, softly, and plunged back in.
Reed flutes whistled mournfully. Allister Park didn’t think it was fit music for a fanfare, but nobody’d asked him.
“Judge Ib Scoglund of the International Court of Skrelleland!” a flunky bawled in Ketjwa. Park bowed at the doorway to the big reception hall, slowly walked in.
Slowly was the operative word, he thought. Kuuskoo was more than two miles above sea level; the air was chilly and, above all, thin. He’d come by train from the broiling tropical port of Ookonja in less than a day. Any sudden motion made his heart pound wildly. He looked around for a chair.
He spotted one, but before he could sit down, a big, red-faced man came over to pump his hand. “Haw, good to meet you, Hallow, er, Thane, er, Judge Scoglund,” he boomed. “I’m Osfric Lundqvist, the Bretwaldate’s spokesman to the Son of the Sun.”
“Thank you, Thane Lundqvist,” Park said.
“My joyment.” Lundqvist did not let go of Park’s hand.
“Thank you,” Park repeated, trying to find some polite way to disengage himself from the ambassador. Lundqvist was, he knew, an amiable nonentity who drank too much. Because several nations lay between Vinland and Tawantiinsuuju, this was a safe enough post for a rich squire with more influence than ability. No matter how badly he blundered, he could not start a war by himself.