*
Late afternoon on a golden summer day: On a low ridge overlooking a gently sloping vale, a party of riders – exclusively male, of gentle breeding, discreetly armed but not under arms – paused for refreshment. To the peasants bent sweating over sickle and sheaf, they would be little more than dots on the horizon, as distant as the soaring eagle high above, and of as little immediate consequence.
‘I fear this isn’t a promising site,’ said one of the onlookers, a hatchet-faced man in early middle age. ‘Insufficient cover – see the brook yonder? And the path over to the house, around that outcrop? – we’d stick out like pilliwinksed fingers.’
‘Bad location for helicopters, though,’ said a younger man. ‘See, the slope of the field: makes it hard for them to land. And for road access, I think we can add some suitable obstacles. Caltrops, pits. If the major is right and they can bring vehicles across, they won’t have an easy time of it.’
Earl Bentbranch hung back, at the rear of the party. He glanced at his neighbor, Stefan ven Arnesen. Ven Arnesen twined his fingers deep in his salt-and-pepper beard, a distant look on his face. He noticed Bentbranch watching and nodded slightly.
‘Do you credit it?’ Bentbranch murmured.
Ven Arnesen thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said softly, ‘no, I don’t.’ He looked at the harvesters toiling in the strip fields below. It didn’t look like the end of the world as he knew it. ‘I can’t.’
‘They may not come for a generation. If ever. To throw everything away out of panic . . .’
Ven Arnesen spared his neighbor a long, appraising look. ‘They’ll come. Look, the harvest comes. And with it the poppies. Their war dead – their families used to wear poppies to remember them, did you know that?’
‘You had your tenants plant dream poppies in the divisions.’
‘Yes. If the bastards come for us, it’s the least I can do. Give it away’ – he looked out across his lands, as far as the eye could see – ‘for free.’ He coughed quietly. ‘I’m too old to uproot myself and move on, my friend. Let the youngsters take to the road, walk the vale of tears as indigent tinkers just like our great-great-grandfathers’ grandsires once more. These are my lands and my people and I’ll not be moving. All this talk of business models and refugees can’t accommodate what runs in my veins.’
‘So you’ll resist?’
Ven Arnesen nodded tiredly. ‘Of course. And you haven’t made your mind up yet.’
‘I’m . . . wavering. I went to school over there, do you remember? I speak Anglische, I could up sticks and go to this new world they’re talking of, I’d be no more or less of a stranger there than I was for seven years in Baltimore. But I could dig my own midden, too, or run to Sky Father’s priests out of mindless panic. I could do any number of stupid or distasteful things, were I so inclined, but I don’t generally do such things without good reason. I’d need a very good reason to abandon home and hearth and accept poverty and exile for life.’
‘The size of the reason one needs becomes greater the older one gets,’ ven Arnesen agreed. ‘But I’m not convinced by this nonsense about resisting the American army, either. I’ve seen their films. I’ve spent a little time there. Overt resistance will be difficult. Whatever Ostlake and his cronies think.’
‘I don’t think they believe anything else, to tell you the truth. If – when – they come, the Americans will outgun us as heavily as we outgunned the Pervert’s men. And there will be thousands of them, tens of thousands. With tanks and helicopters. Sure, we’ll kill a few of them. And that will make it worse, it’ll make them even angrier. They’re not good at dealing with locals, not good at native tongues. They’ll kill and they’ll burn and they’ll raise every man’s hand against them and their occupation, and it will still take a bloody five years of pain and tears and death before they’ll even think about changing their approach. By which time – ’
‘Look.’ Ven Arnesen raised his arm and pointed.
‘Where?’
‘Look up.’ A ruler-straight white line was inching across the turquoise vault of the sky, etching it like a jeweler’s diamond on glass. A tiny speck crawled through the air, just ahead of the moving tip of the line. ‘Is that what, what I think it is?’
‘A contrail.’ Bentbranch’s cheeks paled. ‘It’s them.’
‘Are you sure? Could it be something else? Something natural – ’
‘No. Their jets make those cloud-trails, when they move through the sky.’
‘And they look down on us from above? Do you suppose they can see us now? Lightning Child strike them blind.’
‘I very much fear that they’re anything but blind.’ Bentbranch looked away as the aircraft’s course led it westwards, towards the sunset. ‘Though how much detail they can see from up there . . . well, that tears it, of course. They will be drawing up maps, my lord. And they care naught that we know their mind. I find that a singularly ominous sign. Do you differ, can I ask?’
‘No.’ Ven Arnesen shook his head as he stared after the aircraft. ‘No.’ But Bentbranch was unable to discern whether he was answering the question or railing against the sign in the heavens.
Ahead of them, the main group of riders, Lord Ostlake and his men, had noticed the contrail; arms were pointing and there were raised voices. ‘We should warn them,’ Bentbranch said, nudging his horse forward. Ven Arnesen paid him no attention, but stared at the sky with nerve-struck eyes.
Out over the ocean in the east, the contrail was already falling apart, like the dreams of future tranquility that it had so carelessly scrawled across.
It would not take many more thirty-thousand-foot overflights to update the air force’s terrain maps.
*
The old woman had been reading a book, and it still lay open on her lap, but her attention was elsewhere. There was a discreet knock at the door. She looked up as it opened, and adjusted her spectacles, unsurprised at the identity of her visitor. ‘Yes?’
‘Your grace.’ The door closed behind him. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’
‘No, no . . .’ She slid a bookmark into place, then carefully closed the book and placed it on the table beside her. ‘I’ve got plenty of time. All the time in the world.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, I’d like to apologize for leaving you to your own devices for so long. I trust you have been well-attended?’
‘Young man, you know as well as I do that when one is in a jail cell, however well furnished, it does little good to grumble at the jailer.’
‘It might, if you harbor some hope of release. And might reasonably expect to be in a position of authority over your captor, by and by.’ He waited.
She stared at him grimly. ‘Release?’ She raised her right hand. It shook, visibly. She let it fall atop the book. ‘Release from what?’ The palsy was worse than it had been for some time. ‘What do you think I have to look forward to, even if you give me the freedom of the city outside these walls? Without imported medicines my quality of life will be poor. I can’t use that liberty you hint at.’ She gestured at the wheelchair she sat in. ‘This is more of a jail than any dungeon you can put me in, Riordan.’
Rather than answering, the earl crossed the stone-flagged floor of the day room and, picking up the heavy armchair from beside the small dining table, turned it to face her. Then he sat, crossing one leg over the other, and waited.
After a while she sighed. ‘Credit me with being old enough to be a realist.’ She paused. ‘I’m not going to see the right side of sixty again, and I’ve got multiple sclerosis. It’s gaining on me. I’d like to go back home to Cambridge, where I hear they’ve got stuff like hot and cold running water and decent health care, but thanks to my dear departed mother and her fuckwitted reactionary conspirators that’s not a terribly practical ambition, is it? I’m too old, too ill, and too tired to cast off and start up anew in another world, Riordan. I did it once, in my youth, but it was a terrible strain even with Angbard’s connivance. Besides, you nee
d me here in this gilded cage. Rule of law, and all that.’
‘The rule of law.’ Riordan leaned forward. ‘You’ve never been much for that, have you?’
Patricia’s face flickered in something that might have been the ghost of a smile. ‘I’ve never been much of one for bending the neck to authority.’ She shook her head. ‘If I had been born to a lower estate I’d have been lucky to have made it to adulthood. As it is, the lack of highborn bloodlines taking precedence over mine – well. Easier to be rebellious when you’re the daughter of a duke, not a slave. What did you want to talk to me about?’
Her attempt to wrong-foot Riordan failed. ‘To ask you what I should do with you, your grace.’
‘Well, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I suppose it depends what you want to achieve.’
‘I want to keep our people alive.’ He crossed his arms. ‘What do you want?’
‘Huh.’ Her smile slipped away. ‘It’s come to that?’
‘You know it has. I’m not going to charge you with petty treason, your grace; the only evidence against you is your own word, and besides, the victim had abducted you and was a conspirator at high treason. To hold her poisoning against you would be ungrateful, not to mention sending entirely the wrong message. But there is a question to which I would like some answers.’
‘My brother?’
Riordan shook his head. ‘I know you didn’t kill him. But Dr. ven Hjalmar is missing. And so is a certain set of medical records.’
‘A set of – ’ Patricia stopped dead. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘I’ve been reading Angbard’s files.’ Riordan’s tone was quiet but implacable. ‘I know about the fertility clinics and the substituted donor sperm. Five thousand unwitting outer-family members growing up in the United States. The plan to approach some of them and pay them to bear further children. I’m not stupid, Patricia. I know what that plan would mean to the old ladies and their matchmaking and braid alliances. The files are missing, your grace. Do you happen to know where they are?’
She shook her head. ‘Not exactly, no.’
‘And inexactly?’
‘I don’t think I should answer that question. For your own good.’
Riordan made a fist of his left hand and laid it quietly down on the table beside him. ‘Why?’
‘It’s an insurance policy, kid. I don’t know exactly where the records are any more, only where they’re going to surface. Griben ven Hjalmar – if you see him, shoot him on sight, I beg you. He may have made off with a copy of the breeding program records too.’
‘Why?’ repeated the earl. ‘I think you owe me at least an explanation.’
‘Our numbers are low. If they dip lower, the trade – our old trade – may no longer be viable. But at the same time, Angbard’s plan was destabilizing in the extreme. If Clan Security suddenly acquired an influx of tractable, trained world-walkers with no loyalty to family or braid – it would overbalance the old order, would it not? We agree that much, yes?’
Riordan nodded reluctantly. ‘So?’
‘So Hildegarde tried to smash the program, at least by seizing the infants and having them adopted by conservative families. Griben was her cat’s-paw. It was a power play and countermove, nothing more. But her solution would give us other problems. There is a reason why we are six high families and their clients, why each group numbers less than three hundred. An extended family – a clan, not our great collective Clan, but a normal grouping – is of that order, you know? Anthropologists have theories to explain why humans form groups of that size. Tribes, clans. Dunbar’s number defines the largest number of personal relationships a human being can easily keep track of, and it’s somewhere between 150 and 300. We knit our six tribes together into one bigger group, to permit the braiding of a recessive genetic trait without excessive inbreeding. But if you triple our numbers – well, there was a reason we were susceptible to civil war eighty years ago. If a tribe grows too large it splinters along factional lines.’
‘But you’re – ’ Riordan stopped. ‘Oh.’
Patricia nodded. ‘Yes. If Hildegarde’s idea – bring the newborn world-walkers into the Clan’s client families and raise them among us – had worked, we’d have grown much too fast to maintain control. It would have set us up for another damaging civil war.’
‘Have you destroyed the records, then?’
She shook her head. ‘No need. We may even need them later. I leave that to the Council’s future deliberations; but in the meantime, I took steps to ensure that nobody would use them to breed an army of world-walkers. It has to be done openly, with the consent of the entire Clan, or not at all. And if it happens, we won’t be able to operate as a family business any more: We’ll need a system of governance that scales up to manage larger numbers.’
‘I can live with that – if you can guarantee it.’
‘The problem is ven Hjalmar.’ She turned her face to the window. A beam of sunlight splashed through it, lengthening across the floor. ‘The sleazy little tapeworm’s stolen a set of the records. And now he’s gone missing. You know that Helge will hang him as soon as look at him. Put yourself in his shoes – where would you go?’
Riordan stared at her. ‘You think he’d defect to . . . who? The Lees?’
‘I wouldn’t bet against it. He might be lying low in America, but what’s he going to do? He can’t fake up a good enough identity to practice as an ob/gyn – the full academic and employment track record would be a lot harder than a regular cover – so he can’t simply jump the wall and hide there, not unless he’s willing to take a big cut in his standard of living. So he needs sponsorship. The breeding program is . . . well, it’d be more useful to the Lees than it is to us: They’re not far from extinction, did you know that? They’ve got less than a hundred world-walkers. He might have gone to the US government a couple of weeks ago, but he can’t do that now: They wouldn’t need him once they get their hands on the breeding program records and they’re in no mood to be accommodating. That leaves the Lee family, or maybe the authorities in New Britain, but the latter won’t have a clue what he’s offering them without a working demonstration.’
‘God-on-a-stick.’ Riordan ran one hand through his thin hair. ‘I’ll point Olga after him. One more damn thing to worry about.’
‘I have a question.’ Patricia waited.
‘Yes?’
‘My daughter’s interest in Roland last year.’ She licked suddenly dry lips. ‘And Olga was betrothed to him. And that nasty business Helge told me about, in the old orangery. Which was that to do with – Mr. Cheney or the breeding program?’
‘Cheney – ’ For a moment Riordan looked confused. He shook his head. ‘Let me think. There was something about it in the files. The old man knew there was a leak; Olga was investigating. I think he may have set her on him – she was still under cover so she could run the fresh-faced ingénue pumping her fiancé – to see if he was the leak. Someone on the inside was still colluding with the vice president after we officially cut him off, and Roland was considered unreliable. But you may be right. Economics was his big thing, wasn’t it? If he was talking to ven Hjalmar . . .’ He trailed off.
‘A tame army of world-walkers,’ Patricia said tartly. ‘If Roland had been planning to defect, and if he could get his hands on the breeding-program records and take them to the Family Trade Organization, he could have named his own price, couldn’t he? Was that why he had to die?’
Riordan gave her a flat stare. ‘You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.’
Patricia met his gaze. After several long seconds she nodded, very slightly. ‘In any case, there are other plausible explanations. My mother, for example. There’s no way she would have allowed her granddaughter to marry a mere earl. Not with a pliable prince on offer, and her own elder sister – the queen-mother – happy to match-make for her grandson.’
‘That is true.’ Riordan inclined his head. Then he took a deep breath. ‘I find
the weight of your half-brother’s secrets inordinately onerous, my lady. I wish I could confide fully in you; it’s only those matters concerning your bloodline which give me cause for hesitation. I hope you can forgive me – but can you put yourself in my place?’
Patricia nodded again. ‘I beg your forgiveness. I don’t believe even for a moment that you might have arranged the liquidation of your elder brother Roland, not even on the duke’s orders. I don’t think Angbard would have given such a – but we live in paranoid times, do we not? And we know Dr. ven Hjalmar is a lying sack of shit who liked to incriminate other people.’
‘Indeed. Did I mention it was his signature on your brother’s death certificate?’
‘Was it really?’ Patricia breathed.
‘Yes. Really.’ Riordan cleared his throat. ‘Just so you understand what – who – we’re dealing with here. I gather Helge has given her retainers certain orders in his regard. I’m inclined to declare him outlaw before Clan Security. If you, and the committee, concur?’
Patricia nodded emphatically. ‘Oh, yes.’
They sat in contemplative silence for a minute.
‘Are you sure I can’t convince you to go to New Britain?’ asked Riordan. ‘Your daughter could use your support.’
‘She’s a grown woman who can make her own mistakes,’ Patricia said sharply. ‘And I’ll thank you for not telling her what I had to do to give her that freedom.’ Softly: ‘I think it better for the older generation to retire, you know. Rather than fighting, kicking and screaming, against the bitter end.’
‘I’m certain they could take care of you, over there,’ the earl pointed out. ‘If you stay behind when the Americans come . . .’
‘I’ll die.’ She sniffed. ‘I’ve been there, to the other world, Frederick. It’s backward and dangerous. With my condition it’s just a matter of time. Did I tell you, my mother was dying? She thought she had a year to live. Didn’t occur to her to ask how I was doing, oh no. If it had, and if she’d won, she might have outlived me, you know.’
The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Page 56