A Sterkarm Kiss

by Susan Price

  “Ask them if they’d like her,” Windsor said.

  “I’ve already asked them that.”

  Irritated and contemptuous, Windsor said, “No. Ask them if they’d like to screw her.”

  Gareth was silent for a moment. He wanted to ask, What? Am I a pimp now? But he knew that Windsor would only order him to do his job. “I’m not sure how to ask that.”

  “I thought you were a translator? Ask them!”

  It took a few seconds to get their attention away from the car and its speed, but then Gareth said, “Woman in alehouse—er—” He felt his face reddening and was furious with himself. “Would you—er. Like to lie with her?”

  They stared at him. Had they understood? Blushing even more, Gareth put one hand in the crook of his elbow and jerked his arm upward in an unmistakable gesture.

  Per laughed. “Ya!” Ingram just laughed.

  2

  21st Side: Taking the Position

  Sunlight streamed through the large windows into the room, shining on the polished wood of desk and floor, glinting in the mirrors. The warmth strengthened the scent of the roses in a bowl on a side table and made their petals fall.

  Andrea sat on the couch under the window, feet neatly together, hands folded in her lap, waiting, as she’d been waiting for nearly fifteen minutes. In front of her was a low table holding a spread of glossy magazines. On the other side of the room, at her work station, sat Windsor’s plump, pleasant, middle-aged secretary.

  Sighing, Andrea turned her head and looked out at the wide lawns and mature trees of the grounds. She knew them well, having worked here, at Dilsmead Hall, before—in the days when she’d commuted five hundred years in the Time Tube, as other people commute five miles on the tube.

  This is a mistake, she thought. I know it’s a mistake. Worse—if I take this position, it’ll be a disaster, because it has to be a setup. Windsor must already have decided to give her the job, or why would he have gone to the trouble to find out where she was working and come visiting? Windsor wouldn’t have dropped in on her for old time’s sake. So it was a scam. Beware, beware!

  Just get up, she told herself. Walk out. Go home. Get a life.

  She remained on the couch.

  Catching her eye, the secretary smiled and said, “I’m sure Mr. Windsor won’t be much longer.” A buzzer sounded, and with another smile she said, “There you are! You can go in now.”

  Oh, thank you so much, Andrea thought as she stood. I am now graciously allowed to enter Windsor’s presence. She crossed to the door of the inner office, thinking, I should march in there, tell him where he can stick his job and his head, and walk out.

  She teetered on the edge of doing it.

  She did refuse to knock before opening the door. Grasping the door’s brass handle, she firmly turned it and strode in.

  “Andrea!” Windsor said, rising from behind his desk and coming to meet her, as if her appearance was a complete surprise and he hadn’t deliberately been keeping her waiting. She noticed that he still had the big, framed photo on his wall—the one of the Sterkarm tower against a stormy sky. As if he owned the tower—as if it was his country home. “Let’s use my cozy corner,” he said, ushering her to one side of the room.

  The “cozy corner” had a couch and three easy chairs arranged around a low, smoked-glass coffee table. Whenever she’d spoken with Windsor in his office before, she’d had to take one of the low chairs directly in front of his big desk, where she’d felt—as she’d been meant to feel—exposed and clumsy. Obviously, today she was to be charmed. She refused to be charmed.

  “Beryl will bring us some coffee and biscuits soon. Or cake? Would you prefer cake? Or both?” Windsor gave his supposedly charming smile, which Andrea would have called a smirk. Even when he tried to be charming, he couldn’t resist a jibe.

  “Just coffee, thank you.”

  “Sure? We don’t want you fainting on the train home.”

  Andrea looked at him, at his thick, dark, oiled hair; at his fleshy face, above all at his smirk; and the detestation she felt for him rose up in her so strongly that it was difficult to keep her face from showing it, and perhaps she didn’t entirely succeed. She remembered all the good reasons she had for detesting him, and thought: Why am I meekly going along with this? “Cut the crap,” she said. “What’s this about?”

  “Andrea! That’s not like you!”

  “When you came into the pub that day—was that Per with you? Was it?” It was the question she’d traveled two hundred miles or more to ask, and she saw a flicker—just a flicker—of consternation in Windsor’s face. The conversation wasn’t going the way he’d planned. Good.

  The door opened and Beryl came in, carrying their coffee and cookies on a tray. The few seconds she was in the room, asking if everything was all right and if there was anything they needed, gave Windsor time to collect himself.

  “So how have you been?” he asked, pouring coffee as the door closed behind Beryl. “I haven’t been too well myself. I’m still not one hundred percent—probably overdoing it, but once a workaholic, always a workaholic.”

  Andrea set her teeth and refused to say the polite, solicitous things her upbringing prompted her to say.

  “They grew me a new piece of gut, you know—amazing work. I had an incredibly good team of surgeons, and tiptop aftercare. One of the best hospitals in the country. Shockingly expensive, but worth every penny and more. Still, it’s not something you shrug off, a lance in the guts.”

  “Was it Per?”

  Windsor smirked. “You mean, who stuck the lance in my gut?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My, Andrea, you’ve become very prickly.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling, and crossed his legs. His trouser leg hitched up a little, but only enough to show a black sock, damn him. “In answer to your question, I can only say, yes—and no.”

  “And does that mean anything?”

  “Working as a barmaid is obviously very bad for the temper. I mean yes, it was Per, but not Per as you know him.”

  Andrea stood. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going.”

  “Back to working in a pub?”

  “The great advantage of working in a pub,” Andrea said, looking down at him, “is that every day I meet a far better class of person than you.”

  Windsor raised his thick, dark brows. “Oh dear. Andrea, sit down. Please, sit down. I’ll explain. The Tube is up and running again.”

  “I guessed that much,” Andrea said, still standing. “Why? It was supposed to be economically unviable. It was closed down.”

  “Just because something’s closed down, Andrea, it doesn’t mean that it has to stay closed down.”

  “It was closed because the Sterkarms slapped your greedy snouts away from the trough. So why is it suddenly open again?”

  Windsor didn’t like being spoken to like that, but he hardly showed it—which made Andrea even more suspicious. “Please sit down again, Andrea. It was that crowd of unimaginative penny stackers in Accounts who got it closed, with their usual shortsightedness. It stayed closed for just as long as it took the company to digest Accounts’ figures and realize how many billions they’d have thrown away on research and development if it stayed closed, with about as much chance of getting any of it back as a paraplegic has of playing for Manchester United.” He smiled, congratulating himself on being daring enough to say things like that. “So the Board gritted its collective teeth and decided to push on until there is a return. This is real business, you see, Andrea—Big Business. It’s not managing your building-society account—or the books at the Rose and Crown. Besides, what’s a few billion against loss of face? And properly considered, our problems last time were more a failure of security than anything. I said so, in my report.”

  Andrea blinked and thought through her memory of events. She had the im
pression that, all along, Windsor had consistently underestimated the Sterkarms’ treachery, intelligence, and ferocity. Despite being warned many times. “It was a failure of security?”

  “Bryce. You remember Bryce?”

  Andrea did. She’d liked the man. Ex-army and Head of Security at Dilsmead Hall. He’d been killed. By the Sterkarms. Skewered by a lance, actually, and then beheaded, on the neat gravel path that ran behind the building. “So you’re blaming it all on Bryce,” she said. “Because he isn’t here to say otherwise.”

  “That’s very cynical, Andrea.”

  “It’s very true, you mean? Bryce did a good job, as far as he was allowed to. And he was still trying to do a good job when—”

  “I’m not deaf, Andrea. Don’t shout at me.”

  “I’m not shouting. Bryce was killed. And not just Bryce. I’ve been wondering ever since—just how the hell did you cover that up?”

  Windsor sighed. “We paid compensation, of course. What’s the big deal? Thousands of people are killed every day in car crashes—who ever worries about that? Bryce was killed in an industrial accident. Shit happens. Everybody who works for us signs waiver forms. You did yourself.”

  “But he was beheaded,” Andrea said. “Didn’t his family ask questions?”

  “What if they did? It only needs a soap-opera wedding, a Hollywood couple getting divorced, a politician caught with his pants down—and then who cares about some drone being beheaded north of Watford? Get real, Andrea.”

  She sat quietly for a few moments. Discussing ethics with Windsor was a waste of time and breath. “It was Per in the pub. I knew it was. But he was wearing jeans.”

  “Did you expect me to take him into a pub without his jeans?”

  Andrea grimaced impatiently and didn’t bother to answer. “He didn’t know me.”

  “No,” Windsor agreed. “He wouldn’t.”

  “You’ve taken the Tube further back in time,” she said. “To before we arrived the last time.”

  “Very good! But you don’t quite win the weekend break and luxury hamper.”

  “What then? How could Per not recognize me?”

  “The dimensions,” Windsor said. “Did you ever master the theory? Sixteenth side isn’t our past. It’s the past of another dimension.”

  Andrea sat down, the better to think. Her brows came together as she fought to concentrate. Something tickled at the back of her mind, some connection, but she was too distracted to see what it meant. Abstractedly, she picked up a cookie and bit it, and as the chocolate melted in her mouth, the connections snapped together. “You’ve gone into yet another dimension!” she said. “It was Per—but from another dimension—a dimension where we’ve never been. Per—but a Per I’ve never met.”

  Windsor smirked. “Now you get the cigar.”

  Andrea remembered how Per—this unknown Per—had stared at her in the pub, admiring her. “But it’s close—this dimension? It’s close to the one we did go into?”

  “There’s no essential difference. Except on our side. We’ve tried hard to be pally with the Sterkarms this time, not to upset them. Give them what they want. Aspirins. Jeans. It seems to be working.”

  Andrea was only half listening. A snatch of words and melody ran through her head—one of the many, many songs she’d learned when she’d lived with the Sterkarms.

  Oh, see you my tall love, with his cheeks like roses?

  Screw the job, she thought. Who cared about the job? What mattered was that she was being given a chance to meet Per again for the first time.

  Oh, his hair it shines like gold,

  His eyes like crystal stones—

  He wouldn’t know her, but she would know him. She would be the beautiful Elf-May again, knowing more than mere mortal women know. She had here what people had always longed for but had never before had—the chance to go back to the best, most exciting part of their lives and live it again.

  From the midst of a whirl of feeling, she tried to reason. “But why am I here?”

  “I need you to do your old job—a bit of diplomacy and liaising, a lot of translating. Observing, educating. You always were the best.”

  Beware of flattery, Andrea thought, especially when it comes from James Windsor. “I broke the terms of my contract. I fraternized with the 16th siders. You wouldn’t have brought Per 21st side if it hadn’t been for me. He wouldn’t have burned down the Elf-House—I mean the office. You wouldn’t have had a lance stuck in you.”

  Windsor had been nodding ruefully as she spoke. “All true, yes. You were a sad disappointment to us all. But you’re still the best.” It was easy for him to sound sincere because what he said was the truth. If he had other motives for asking Andrea to work for him again, he didn’t have to think of them at that moment. “We’ve found others who could do the job. Universities are full of brain boxes who pick up languages faster than you can scoff a bar of chocolate, but still can’t get work. We gave them your notes and tapes—I might be able to get those freed to you, by the way. You could finally write that book.” Andrea stared at him without smiling or responding. “Just a thought. What was I saying? Oh, the brain boxes. Trouble with them is they can’t take living over there. After a few days they’re running back to the Tube whining that they want to come home because there are no showers or flush lavatories, and there’s bugs and fleas, the food’s awful, and the people are nasty and rough. Whereas you seemed to thrive on it.”

  It sounded plausible, but Andrea was suspicious of the implied compliment. Windsor had never been given to complimenting people. (Per, she was thinking, with another part of her mind. Grab the chance. Meet Per again for the first time.) “You,” she said. “You want. You can—work with Per again? How can you?”

  Windsor spread his hands. “Well,” he said. “I nearly died.”

  “I heard that you were very ill.”

  “And you never even sent me a card. But—when you come that close to death … you change. I know it’s a cliché, but it really is true.”

  Windsor sounded so sincere that Andrea didn’t believe a word. And even as she studied his face, and doubted him, something at the back of her mind yammered, I get to meet Per again! I’m going to see Per again!

  “And I need work,” Windsor said. “And here is work for me to do. I look at it this way—it might have been Per Sterkarm who rammed a spear through me, but it wasn’t this Per Sterkarm. No point in bearing a grudge against this one. And I’m managing things differently this time. I’ve learned from past mistakes. There’s no reason there should ever be any unpleasantness with these Sterkarms.”

  “But—you know what they’re like.” Andrea shook her head. “God knows you know what they’re like. How can you think of trying to do business with them again?”

  “I’m shocked, Andrea. I thought you were their friend.”

  “They were good to me personally,” she said. “I couldn’t help but like them. But nobody could say they’re easy to deal with.”

  “For a pattern of behavior to be changed,” Windsor said, “it needs only one side to change. And I’ve changed. I really think I have. I’m more patient. I’m more relaxed. I don’t mind if things take a little longer, if I don’t win every point. Instead of demanding that they stop raiding, I’m taking a more pragmatic approach. Making it worth twenty times more to them to keep the peace than to raid.”

  Andrea spent a few seconds trying to imagine how that could be done, and failed. “How?”

  “Money, of course. And gifts. We pay them and bribe them to keep the peace. We’re paying them to end the feuds. In fact, at the moment I’m negotiating a truce between the Sterkarms and the Grannams.”

  “The Grannams?” When she’d lived among the Sterkarms, she’d come to think of the Grannams as almost horned, hoofed, and tailed. They’d feuded with the Sterkarms for so long that it had become a given of
life, without needing a reason or origin. Scores of murders and maimings had been committed on both sides, for which each family blamed the other. Making peace between them was at least as difficult as bringing peace to Northern Ireland or the Middle East.

  “I’m filling their sword hands with gold,” Windsor said. “Loading their sword arms with jeans, and T-shirts, and stout boots, and aspirin. Every time they remember another killing, another raid, I pay them blood money for it—so much that even they have to admit the score is settled. I’m promising them ongoing payments as long as peace lasts.”

  “And, of course, what they think is a fortune is chicken feed to you.”

  Windsor gave a stately nod, almost a bow. “Admittedly.”

  Andrea shook her head. “It’ll never work.”

  “It is working.”

  “And you,” Andrea said, staring at him. “You can still see Per—even this Per—and be with him—without. I mean, you don’t—go through it all again? It must have been frightening. You don’t—?”

  “Suffer flashbacks?” Windsor said. “Post-traumatic stress disorder? You read too many magazines, Andrea.”

  “But surely—?”

  “It happened,” Windsor said. “It was bad, but it’s over. I lived. What’s that calendar motto—‘If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger’? So I’m stronger, and I get on with the job. Simple as that. Not all of us need lifelong counseling every time we trip on a pavement.”

  “And you don’t want revenge? At all? That’s not why you’re doing this?”

  “Oh, you barmaids do love your drama. I’m not doing anything. It was the Board’s decision to open the Tube again. It’s business, not revenge.”

  “You could have asked for a transfer,” Andrea said. “Or got another job.”

  “I thought about it,” Windsor said with apparent frankness. “But I thought it would be more likely to cause me problems than facing up to things. And my experience is valuable to the company—there aren’t many people who have experience of working 16th side with the Sterkarms. Which brings us back to you. We had our differences, I know, but you were very good at your job. You’d mastered the language, you researched their customs, you got on with them—you understood them. We need you. How about it? Can we bring you back on board?”