The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  “Have you got a level stage?” he asked. “We need to take the cart’s contents.”

  “We have something better, sir.” The guard turned and headed towards the barn. Huw followed him. Opposite the stalls—he saw a lad busily rubbing down the horses—someone had installed a raised platform, planks stretched across aluminum scaffolding. A ramp led up to it, and at the bottom—

  “That’s a good idea,” Elena said admiringly.

  Three big supermarket trolleys waited for them, loaded up with bags. “The regular couriers will bring them back once you unload them,” said the sergeant. He picked up his clipboard. “In view of the current troubles we have no postmaster, but I’m keeping score. For later.”

  “All right.” Huw set his hands to one of the trolleys and pushed it up the ramp. “What’s the other side like?”

  “It’s in a cellar.” The sergeant looked disapproving. “Good thing too. You don’t want to be seen coming and going over there—it’s a real zoo. But you’ll be safe enough here.” He caught Huw’s raised eyebrow and nodded. “I’ll go first, see if I don’t.” He climbed onto the platform and waited while Yulius and Elena pushed their laden trolleys up the ramp. “Here, you let me take that one, young miss. Why don’t you ride for once?” Laying one hand on the trolley’s metal frame, he reached up and tugged a cord leading to a blind on the opposite wall. The blind rose—

  The basement was brick-walled, and the ceiling low, but the Clan’s surveyors had done their job well and the raised floor was a perfectly level match for the platform in the barn. As Huw hauled the first of his suitcases out of the trolley, trying to ignore the nausea and migrainelike headache, he heard voices from the top of the staircase: Elena, and someone else, someone familiar and welcome.

  “My lady Brilliana,” he said. He deposited his case beside the top step—the cellar stairs surfaced in what seemed to be a servants’ pantry—and bowed. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “Sir Huw! How wonderful to see you, too.” She smiled slightly more warmly than was proper: Huw held himself in check, ignoring the impulse to hug her to him. He’d been worried about her for the past week; to find her here, her hair in blond curls, dressed after last year’s New London mode, lifted a huge weight from his heart. Brilliana was an officer of the duke’s intelligence directorate and the queen-widow’s chief of staff—and something more to Huw. She held out her hand, and, somewhat daringly, he bent to kiss it. “Have you had a troublesome time?” she asked, gripping his fingers.

  “Not as bad as some.” Huw straightened up, then gestured at the bags: “I bought the books Miriam wanted. And a few more besides. Yul is”—footsteps creaked on the stairs and he stepped aside as his brother hauled two more suitcases over the threshold—“here, too.”

  “And all these damned bits of paper,” his brother complained, shoving the cases forward. “Lightning Child damn them for a waste of weight—” He stepped forward, out of the path of the sergeant from the other side of the transit post, who heaved another two bags towards Huw.

  “Trig tables,” Huw added. “Have you any idea how hard it is to find five-digit trigonometry tables in good condition? Nobody’s printed them for years. I also threw in a couple of calculators—I found a store with old stock HP-48GXs and a thermal printer, so I bought the lot. They take rechargeable batteries so the only scarce resource is the thermal paper,” he added defensively. “I’m still running the one I bought for my freshman year—they run forever.”

  “Oh, Huw.” Brill shook her head, still smiling. “Listen, I’m sure it’s a good idea! It’s just”—she glanced over her shoulder—“we may not be able to resupply at will, and you know how easily computers break.”

  “These aren’t computers; they’re programmable calculators. But they might as well be mainframes, by these people’s standards.” He was burbling, he realized: a combination of post-world-walking sickness and the peculiar relief of finding Brill alive and well in the wake of the previous week’s events. “Sorry. Been a stressful time. Is Miriam—”

  “She’s in bed upstairs. Resting.” An unreadable expression flickered across Brill’s face. “I’ll give you the tour, if you like. Who else…?”

  “Me, ma’am.” The sergeant reappeared, carrying two more suitcases, wheezing somewhat. “One more to go, sirs, ladies.”

  “No need to overdo it, Marek, the last cases will wait half an hour if you want to put your feet up.” Brill’s concern was obvious: “You’ve already been over today, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but it needs moving and we’re shorthanded—”

  “You’ll be even more shorthanded if you work yourself into a stroke! Go and sit yourself down in the parlor with a mug of beer and a pill until your head clears. Go on, I’ll get Maria to look after you—” Brill dragged the sergeant out of the servants’ stairwell, seemingly by main force of will, then returned to lead Huw into the downstairs lounge. “He’s right that they’re badly undermanned over there, but he insists on trying to do everything,” she said apologetically. “There’s too much of that around here.”

  “Too much of it everywhere!” Elena said emphatically. “Why, if I hadn’t forced Huw to let me drive—but how is her royal highness?” She looked at Huw: “Won’t she want to—”

  “Yes, how is she?” Huw began, then stopped. Brill’s expression was bleak. “Oh. Oh shit.”

  “The lady Helge is perfectly all right.” Brilliana’s voice was emotionless. “But she’s very tired and needs time to recover.”

  “Recover from what?” Yul chipped in before Elena could kick his ankle.

  “Her express instructions are that you are to tell no one,” Brill continued, looking Huw straight in the eye. “Nobody is going to leave this house who cannot keep his or her mouth shut, at least until it no longer matters.”

  “Until what matters?” Yul asked, head swiveling between Brilliana and Huw with ever-increasing perplexity.

  “Was it spontaneous?” Huw demanded.

  Brill nodded reluctantly. “The day of the putsch.”

  “Let me see her?” demanded Elena. “My mother was midwife to the district nobility when I was young and she taught me—”

  Yul stood by, crestfallen and lost for words. “Give me your locket,” Brill said to Elena. “And you too,” she added to Yul. She spared Huw but a brief narrow-eyed glance that seemed to say, If I can’t trust you, then who? “You’re not to tire her out, mind,” she added for Elena’s benefit. “If she’s sleeping, leave her be.” Then she turned towards the door to the owner’s rooms. “Leave the cases for now, Huw. Let me fill you in on what’s been going wrong here.…”

  * * *

  In the end, there was no siege: The house surrendered without a shot being fired, doors and windows flung wide, a white flag running up the pole that rose from the apex of the steeply pitched roof.

  That wouldn’t have been enough to save the occupants, of course. Riordan was not inclined towards mercy: In the wake of a hard-fought civil war against the old nobility, it was quite obvious to one and all that the Clan divided must fall, and this rebellion could be seen as nothing but the blackest treachery. But by the same token, the families were weak, their numbers perilously low—and acts of gratuitous revenge would only weaken them further, and risk sowing the seeds of blood feud to boot. “Arrest everyone,” he’d instructed his captain on the ground, Sir Helmut: “You may hang Oliver Hjorth, Griben ven Hjalmar, or”—a lengthy list of confirmed conspirators—“out of hand, and you may deal as you wish with anyone who resists, but we must avoid the appearance of revenge at all costs. We can afford to spare those who did not raise arms against us, and who are guilty only of following their sworn liege—and their dependents.”

  Helmut’s mustache quivered. “Is this wise, sir?” he asked.

  “It may not be wise, but it is necessary,” Riordan retorted. “Unless you think we should undertake our enemies’ work for them by cutting each other’s throats to the last?”

&nbs
p; And so: This was the third great holding of a rebel family that Sir Helmut had ridden into in two days. And they were getting the message. At the last, the house of Freyn-Hankl, a minor outer family connected with the Hjorth lineage, the servants had risen up and locked their upstart landowners in the wine cellars, and sued for mercy. Sir Helmut, mindful of his commanding officer’s advice, had rewarded them accordingly, then sent them packing to spread the word (before he discreetly executed his prisoners—who had, to be fair, poisoned the entire staff of the local Security post by treachery). Facing the open windows and doors of the summer house at Judtford, with his soldiers going in and coming out at will, he was pleased with the outcome of this tactic. Whether or not it was wise or necessary, it was certainly proving to be effective.

  “Sir! If you please, to the drawing room.” A startled-looking messenger boy, barely in his teens, darted from the front door.

  Sir Helmut stared at him. “In whose name?” he demanded.

  “Sir! Two duchesses! One of them’s the queen’s mum, an’ the other is hers! What should we do with them, Jan wants to know?”

  Sir Helmut stared some more, until the lad’s bravado collapsed with a shudder. Then he nodded and glanced over his shoulder. “Sammel, Karl, accompany me,” he snapped. The two soldiers nodded and moved in, rifles at the ready. “Lead me to the ladies,” he told the messenger. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The withdrawing room was dark, and cramped with too much overstuffed furniture, and it smelled of face powder and death. Flies buzzed near the ceiling above the occupants, a pair whom Sir Helmut could not help but recognize. One of them was sleeping. “What happened here?” he demanded.

  The younger of the pair—the one who was mother to the queen-widow—looked at him from beneath drooping eyelids. “Was ’fraid you wouldn’t get here,” she slurred.

  “What—”

  “Poison. In tha’ wine. Sh-she started it.” A shaking hand rose slowly, pointed at the mounded fabric, the shriveled, doll-like body within. “Tha’ coup. ’S’hers. Did it for Helge, she said.”

  “But—” Helmut’s eyes took in the empty decanter, the lack of motion. “Are you drunk, or—”

  “Dying, prob’ly.” She wheezed for a second or two; it might have been laughter. “Poisoned the wine with pure heroin. The trade of queens.”

  “I see.” Helmut turned to the wide-eyed messenger lad: “You. Run along and fetch a medic, fast.” To the duchess: “There’s an antidote. We’ll get you—”

  “No.” Patricia closed her eyes for a long moment. “Ma, Hilde-Hildegarde. Started this all. Leave her. No trial. As for me…” She subsided, slurring. A rattling snort emanated from the other chair and Helmut glanced at the door, before leaning to listen to the old woman’s chest.

  Helmut rose and, turning on his heel, strode towards the door. Crone save me, he subvocalized. The messenger was coming, a corpsman following behind. “I have two heroin overdoses for you,” Helmut told him. “Forget triage; save the younger one first if at all possible.”

  “Heroin overdose?” The paramedic looked startled. “But I don’t have—are you sure—”

  “Deliberate poisoning. Get to it.” Helmut stepped aside as the medic nodded and went inside. Helmut breathed deeply, then turned to the messenger. “Here.” He pulled out his notepad and scribbled a brief memo. “Tell comms to radio this to Earl-Major Riordan in day code purple, stat.” The lad took the note and fled. Helmut stared after him for a moment then shook his head. What a mess. Poisoning and attempted matricide versus kidnapping: petty treason versus high treason. How to weigh the balance? “Jester’s balls, if only I’d been delayed an hour on the road.…”

  * * *

  Miriam lay in bed, propped up on a small mountain of pillows, staring blankly at the floral-patterned wallpaper behind the water jug on the dresser and thinking about death.

  I never wanted it. So why am I feeling so bad? she wondered. What the hell is wrong with me?

  It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to have a baby: Griben ven Hjalmar’s artificial insemination was, if not actual rape, then certainly morally equivalent. He—his sponsors (she shied away from thinking about them)—had wanted an heir to the throne. They’d specifically wanted her to bear the heir, and not trusting her to willingly have intercourse with the man they were forcing her to marry—a man who was so badly damaged by a poisoning incident in his childhood that he could barely talk—they had held her captive and committed a most unspeakable act upon her person. The irony of which was that her thirty-something womb was still fertile, but the marriage had been a most signal failure, disrupted by Prince Creon’s elder brother in a spectacularly bloody putsch that ignited an all-out civil war in the Gruinmarkt. By the time the dust settled, Miriam had been three weeks pregnant, the entire royal family was dead … and she was carrying the heir to the throne, acknowledged by all who had survived the lethal betrothal ceremony.

  She had not taken the news well; only Huw’s cunning offer to help her obtain a termination—if that was what she willed—had kept her from running, and not stopping until she arrived at the nearest available abortion clinic. As the immediate rage and humiliation and dread faded, she began to reevaluate the situation: not from an American woman’s perspective, but with the eyes of a Clan noblewoman catapulted headlong into the middle of a fraught political dilemma. I don’t have to love it. I don’t have to raise it. I just have to put up with eight months of back pain and morning sickness and get it out of my body. And in return … they’d promised her the moon on a stick: a seat at the highest table, as much power and wealth as anyone in that godforsaken mediaeval nightmare of a country could have, and most important of all, security. Security for herself, for her mother, for her friends. A chance to fix some of the things that were wrong with the Clan, from the inside, working with allies. Even a chance to try and do something about the bigger picture: to jump-start the process of dragging the Gruinmarkt towards modernity.

  She’d signed a fraught compromise with her conscience. Perhaps she was just rationalizing her situation, even succumbing to Stockholm syndrome—the tendency of the abducted to empathize with their kidnappers—and while she hated what had been done to her, she was no longer eager to dispose of the unwanted pregnancy. She’d done it before, many years ago; it had been difficult, the situation looming no less inconveniently in a life turned upside down, but she’d persevered. She’d even, a year ago, harbored wistful thoughts about finding a Mr. Right and—

  Her body had betrayed her.

  I’m thirty-five, damn it. Not an ideal age to be pregnant, especially in a mediaeval backwater without rapid access to decent medical care. Especially in the middle of a civil war with enemies scheming for her demise, or worse. She’d been stressed, anxious, frightened, and still in the first trimester: and when the cramps began she’d ignored them, refusing to admit what was happening. And now it’s not going to happen. The royal dynasty that had ruled the Gruinmarkt for the past century and a half had bled out in a bedpan in New Britain, while the soldiers watched their maps and the nobles schemed. It wasn’t much worse than a heavy period (aside from the pain, and the shock, and the sudden sense of horror as a sky full of cloud-castle futures evaporated). But it was a death sentence, and not just for the dynastic plans of the conservative faction.

  She’d managed to hold her face together until she was away from Riordan’s headquarters, with Brill’s support. Ridden piggyback across to a farmhouse in the countryside outside small-town Framingham—not swallowed by Boston’s suburbs, in New Britain’s contorted history—that Sir Alasdair had located: abandoned, for reasons unclear, but not decayed.

  “We’ve got to keep you away from court, my lady,” Brill explained, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, as she steered her up the staircase to an underfurnished bedroom. It had been a day since the miscarriage: a day of heavy bleeding, with the added discomfort of a ride in an oxcart through the backwoods around Niejwein. She’d begun shivering with the onset of a
mild fever, not taking it all in, anomalously passive. “When word gets out all hell will follow soon enough, but we can buy time first. Miriam? How do you feel?”

  Miriam had licked her lips. “Freezing,” she complained. “Need water.” She’d pulled the bedding over her shoulders, curling up beneath without removing her clothes.

  “I’ll get a doctor,” Brill had said. And that was about the last thing Miriam remembered clearly for the next forty-eight hours.

  Her fever banished by bootleg drugs—amoxycillin was eerily effective in a world that hadn’t been overexposed to antibiotics—she lay abed, weak but recovering. Brilliana had held the center of her world, drafting in her household staff as they surfaced after the coup, organizing a courier link to the Niejwein countryside, turning her muttered suggestions into firm orders issued in the name of the security directorate’s highest office. I don’t deserve these people, Miriam thought vaguely. Depression stalked her waking hours incessantly, and her mood fluctuated from hour to hour: She couldn’t tell from moment to moment whether she was relieved or bereft. Why do they put up with me? Can’t do anything right. Can’t build a business, can’t have a baby, can’t even stay awake—

  There was a knock at the door.

  She cleared her throat. “Enter.” Her voice creaked like a rusting hinge, underused.

  The door opened. “Miriam?”

  She turned her head. “Ah! Sir Huw.” She cleared her throat again. “Sorry. Not been well.” Huw was still wearing Gruinmarkt-casual: leather leggings, linen blouson. She saw another face behind him: “And, and Elena? Hello, come on in. Sorry I can’t be more hos, hospitable.” She tried to sit up.

  “Your Majesty!” trilled Elena. Miriam tried not to wince. “Oh, you look so ill—”

  “It’s not that bad,” she interrupted, before the girl—Girl? By Clan standards she’s overdue to be married—started gushing. “I had a fever,” she added, to Huw. “Caught something nasty while I was having the miscarriage. Or maybe I miscarried because…” She trailed off. “How have you been?” she added. When at a loss for small talk, ask a leading question. That was what her mother, Iris—or Patricia, to her long-lost family—had brought her up to do. Once, it had made for a career—