He walked alone into quarters of the cities where other tourists did not dare to go, down narrow streets that twisted in a kind of chaos, the buildings mismated, humped together like a string of freight cars of different shapes winding about a curve in the tracks. He stared at the bitter, wizened people he found there and sensed the hardness of their lives. They wore despair like open, unbandaged wounds upon their faces. But even as he nodded to them, smiling patiently at their bewildered responses to his unexpected greetings, he felt ashamed. He knew he cheated them. He was like a general from far behind the lines come forward to review his troops during a lull in the fighting. It was safety he felt like a sheet of thick armor, even its clumsy heaviness comfortable with use. It was immunity he experienced. He might embrace them, roll with them in the gutters, kiss their leprous sores, but their diseases would be helpless against him.
Once he was stopped by four young men. He recognized the fierceness in their eyes.
The leader grabbed his arm, sheathed in the heavy wool. He looked at it sneeringly, as if it were the flag of an enemy country. The others ringed themselves about him.
“What hour is it?” the leader asked.
He told him.
“That is late to be about these streets.”
The one standing behind him said, “There are gangs. Don’t you read the papers?” He felt the words, forced contemptuously from the fellow’s chest, stir the hairs on the back of his neck.
“I fear no gangs,” he said. “It is not late for me.”
“A foreigner,” the leader said, discovering the alien in the sound of his voice. “I’ve never killed a foreigner,” he said seriously. “Have you boys ever killed a foreigner?”
The others laughed easily.
“Give us your money, foreigner,” the leader said.
“I have no money,” he said.
They came forward and were about to begin the gentle nudgings, the subtle insult of elbow and knee that would gain momentum slowly as they gathered courage until at last they would all be upon him, flailing him, caution abandoned, soiling him with their anger and hate. As the leader moved toward him he did not step back. “I am the prince of my country,” he said distinctly, feeling a proud joy as he said the words.
The leader hesitated. “What’s that?” he said.
He told him again. The leader looked to the others, questioning them. Already they stood uneasily, ready to run.
“You lie,” the leader said.
With quick movements he pulled the medallion from beneath his shirt. Holding it in one hand, as far forward as the chain would allow it to reach, he thrust it toward the leader’s face. With his heel and toes he made a series of quick right faces, pausing before each of the men positioned about him, letting them see. Again he faced the leader who now backed away from him deferentially. “Forgive us, your honor,” he said. “We didn’t know. Forgive us, your honor.” He broke and ran. Instantly the others were with him.
He could not, of course, miss the ludicrous aspect of this encounter, but ludicrous or not, they had accepted his claim. It had been easy. The medallion had clinched things, but the assertion itself had been almost enough. Something he had missed before now occurred to him: there was a reputation to be made among the people. The implications startled him. There was a reputation to be made among them. What the boys felt, others could be made to feel. The simplicity of the truth amazed him. He had it in him to be a conqueror. It was not impossible, but he would not do it; he would not usurp where he felt he had no rights.
But the incident forced him into making a decision. He had been in the world a year. His money was almost gone, but he was still no closer to the truth about himself than he had been at home with Khardov. He could waste no more time. He had to invent some system less unwieldy than the random, capricious one he now followed.
The next day he purchased a large folding map of the world and a cheap, second-hand history book, outdated but for his purposes still usable. He sat on the bed in his room and systematically eliminated those countries which he knew would be valueless to him: the perpetual republics; nations which had long since abandoned royalty and where the traces of descendent kings were by this time so adulterated by alliances with ignoble stock that almost any man might claim some sort of tenuous kinship with authority; countries which though still living under the monarchical forms were made up of people obviously alien to his own racial strains. When he had done this he was surprised at the number of countries which had disqualified themselves; as he penciled through each eliminated possibility, he felt that even here, in the small, cramped room, he was somehow coming closer, making his presence felt, bringing about a restoration which would change things in the world.
He made a list of the countries left to him and was pleased at its wieldiness. Of course there were still problems. What would he do for money? He took stock of his resources and realized that he still had more than enough money for one more passage. The countries on his list were either on the continent or near it. Once he had established himself on the continent it would not be difficult to find jobs that would support him while he searched. And he did not need much. He had his medallion, his clothes; he had lived before in small, dark bedrooms. He had only to discover some procedure, some technique of pursuing seriously what before he had actually expected to come to him gratuitously.
He did not know how the occasion would arise, but he had suspected that when recognition came, it would come suddenly, unanticipated, except in the broadest sense: the result, perhaps, of his casual sunbathing on a public beach, the duke’s yacht anchored a quarter mile off shore, the duke himself on deck scanning the beach with a high-power telescope, bored, absently lowering the glass to his chest, checking its magnification against what his own eye could see, lifting it slowly to his eye again — appearing to one beside him almost to fit it to his skull — once more swinging it slowly across the beach, the long tube suddenly catching the dazzle of the medallion; the duke momentarily blinded, muttering, “I say, what’s that damned thing that lad’s got about his neck?” as he slides the telescope back into position for another look, catching again the sudden flare of the medallion intensified in the long glass, stopping, refocusing on the medallion itself now — which to the duke seems ludicrously like a chunk of brilliant fire burning impossibly at the end of a golden chain — waiting patiently until a shadow can bring it to heel, rewarded suddenly by an unplanned sigh from the boy on the beach, who stretches expansively and leans forward as far as he can, placing one palm on the sand beside each ankle, the chest’s forward arch angling the medallion into shadow; the duke excited now, remembering something he had seen once a long time ago, calling anxiously to the regal-looking woman in the deck chair, “Martha, look at this a moment, will you? I’ve the strangest thing trapped in my glass….”