knocked once, twice, then once again. After a moment, the latch clicked. The door swung open.
A short, squat, swarthy man--swarthy, but far from black--wearing a knee-length cotton tunic looked him up and down. “Powers above, you’re a scrawny old bugger,” he remarked in Algarvian.
“Thank you so much, my lord Ansovald. I am so glad to see you again, your Excellency,” Hajjaj answered in the same language. Speaking Algarvian to the former--and perhaps future--Unkerlanter minister to Zuwayza tickled his sense of irony, which needed little tickling. But it was the one speech they truly had in common. His own Unkerlanter was halting, Ansovald s Zuwayzi as near nonexistent as made no difference.
If Ansovald noticed the irony, he didn’t let on. “Well, come in,” he said, and stood aside. “If you want to put on a tunic and hide that bag of bones you call a carcass, I’ve got one here for you.”
That was the usual practice for Zuwayzi diplomats. Hajjaj had grown resigned to wearing a long tunic when calling on envoys from Unkerlant and Forthweg, a short tunic and kilt when seeing a minister from an Algarvic kingdom, a tunic and trousers when meeting with Kaunians, and clothes of some sort, at any rate, when dealing with lands like Kuusamo and Gyongyos, where style of apparel carried less political weight. But growing resigned to it didn’t mean he loved it. He shook his head and answered, “No, thank you. This is unofficial, which means I can be comfortable if I please, and I do.”
He’d thought about wearing a tunic to this meeting too, thought about it and rejected the notion. Nothing would have drawn stares like a clothed Zuwayzi strolling through Jurdhan--nothing except a naked Unkerlanter strolling through Cottbus. And maybe his nudity would disconcert Ansovald.
If it did, the Unkerlanter diplomat didn’t show that, either. “Come in, then,” he said. “I told you that already. I’d sooner you were a woman half your age, but I don’t suppose King Shazli would.”
“No, in a word.” Hajjaj walked into the chamber. Ansovald closed the door behind him, closed it and barred it. From any other kingdom’s minister, Ansovald’s words would have been monstrously rude. From the Unkerlanter, they were something of a prodigy. This was the first time Hajjaj could remember him caring in the slightest for what King Shazli thought.
The room was furnished Zuwayzi-style, with carpet piled on carpet and with cushions large and small a guest could arrange to suit his own comfort. Hajjaj wasted no time doing that. Ansovald followed suit rather more clumsily. He did not offer Hajjaj wine and cakes and tea, as any Zuwayzi host would have done. Instead, very much an Unkerlanter again, he bulled straight ahead: “We aren’t going to settle the war between us this afternoon.”
“I never expected we would,” Hajjaj replied.
“And you can’t tell me you’re able to make the cursed Algarvians pack up and go home, either,” Ansovald growled. “Aye, you and the redheads are in bed with each other, but I know which one’s the tail and which one’s the dog.”
Despite the mixed metaphor, Hajjaj followed him. The Zuwayzi foreign minister said, “If Unkerlant hadn’t come up and ravaged us by force, we would likely be neutral now, not allied to King Mezentio.”
“Oh, aye--tell me another one,” Ansovald jeered. “You’d kick us when we were down, just like everyone else.”
That held a grain of truth, or more than a grain. But what was true and what was diplomatic often had only a nodding relationship, or sometimes none at all. Hajjaj said, “Wouldn’t you be better off if you had fewer foes to fight?”
“What’s your price?” Ansovald was an Unkerlanter, all right: no subtlety to him, no style, no grace. Hajjaj vastly preferred dealing with Marquis Balastro, Algarve’s minister to Zuwayza.
On the other hand, the urbane and dashing Algarvians had been the ones who’d started murdering Kaunians for the sake of advantage in the war. By all accounts, King Swemmel of Unkerlant had wasted not a moment in imitating them, but Algarve went first. Try as he would, Hajjaj couldn’t forget that.
“Your Excellency, Unkerlant went to war with us because the Treaty of Bludenz no longer suited your sovereign,” he said.
“Kyot the traitor signed the Treaty of Bludenz,” Ansovald said, which was true: like Forthweg, Zuwayza had used the chaos reigning in Unkerlant after the Six Years’ War to regain her freedom.
But Hajjaj said, “And King Swemmel always adhered to it afterwards. He got good results when he did, and bad results when he decided not to any longer and invaded us. Isn’t it efficient to do what works well and inefficient to do the opposite?” Swemmel and, because of him, his countrymen prated endlessly of efficiency, but the talk came easier for them than the thing itself.
