The box swayed like a ship on choppy water. It seemed to take forever to make its way across town. By the time the porters planted it with a bone-jarring thump, Miriam had gone from being off her appetite to the first green-cheeked anticipation of full-blown nausea: she welcomed the rattle of chains and the opening of the door like a galley slave released from belowdecks, blinking and gasping. ‘Are we there?’
‘Momentarily.’ The ferret was imperturbable. ‘This way.’ Another closed courtyard with barred windows. Miriam’s spirit fell. They’re just shuffling me between prisons, she realized. I’m surprised he didn’t handcuff me to the chair.
Now the nerves took over. ‘Where is – she isn’t under arrest too, is she?’
Unexpectedly, the ferret chuckled. ‘No, not exactly.’
‘Oh.’ Miriam followed him, two paces ahead of the guards he’d brought along. She glanced at the walls to either side, half-wishing she could make a break for freedom. A couple of gulls squawked raucous abuse from the roofline. She envied them their insolent disdain for terrestrial boundaries.
They came to a solid door in one wall, where a liveried servant exchanged words with the ferret, then produced a key. The door opened on a walled garden. There was a gazebo against the far wall, glass windows – expensively imported, a hallmark of a Clan property – propped open to allow the breeze in. ‘Go right in,’ said the ferret. ‘I believe you are expected. I will collect you later.’
‘What? Aren’t you coming in with me? I thought you were supposed to be watching me at all times?’
The ferret snorted. ‘Not here.’ Then he stepped back through the gate and closed it with a solid click.
Wow. Miriam narrowed her eyes as she looked at the gazebo. Mom’s got clout, then? She marched up to the door. ‘Hello?’ she asked.
‘Come right in, dear.’
Her mother watched her from a nest of cushions piled on top of a broad-winged armchair. She looked more frail than ever, wearing a black velvet gown with more ruffles and bows than a lace factory. ‘Has someone died?’ Miriam asked, stepping into the shadow of the gazebo.
‘Sit down, make yourself comfortable. No one’s died yet, but I’m told it was a close-run thing.’
Miriam sat in the only other chair, next to the circular cast-iron table. Iris watched her: she returned her mother’s gaze nervously. After a while she cleared her throat. ‘How much has Henryk told you?’
‘Enough.’
Another silence.
‘I know I shouldn’t have done it,’ Miriam said, when she couldn’t take it anymore. ‘But I was being deliberately cut out of my own affairs. And they’ve been trying to set me up – ’
‘It’s too late for excuses, kid.’ Miriam stared. Her mother didn’t look angry. She didn’t look sad, but she didn’t look pleased to see her, either. The silence stretched out until finally Iris sighed and shuffled against her cushions, sitting up. ‘I wanted to look at you.’
‘What?’
‘I wanted to look at you again,’ said Iris. ‘One last time. You know they’re going to break you?’
‘I don’t break easily.’ Miriam knew it was false bravado even as the words left her mouth. The great hollow fear congealing inside her gave the lie away. But what else could she say?
Her mother glanced away evasively. ‘We don’t bend.’ She shook her head. ‘None of us does – not me, not you, not even your grandmother. But sooner or later we break. Thirty-three years is what it took, kid, but look at me now. One of the old bitches already.’
‘What do you mean?’ Miriam tensed.
‘I mean I’m about to sell you down the river. At least, that’s how it’s going to seem at first. I’m not going to lie to you: I don’t see any alternatives. We’re stuck playing the long game, kid, and I’m still learning the rules.’
‘Suppose you explain what you just said.’ There was an acid taste in her mouth. Miriam forced herself to unclench her fingers from the arms of her chair. ‘About selling me down the river.’
Iris coughed, wheezing. Miriam waited her out. Presently her mother regained control. ‘I don’t like this any more than you do. It’s just the way things work around here. I don’t have any alternatives, I’m locked up here and you managed to get caught breaking the unwritten rules.’ She sighed. ‘I thought you had more sense than to do that – to get caught, I mean. Anyway, we’re both out of alternatives. If I don’t play the game, neither of us is going to live very long.’
‘I don’t need this!’ Miriam finally let go of her tightly controlled frustration. ‘I have been locked up and policed and poked and pried at and subjected to humiliating medical examinations, and it’s all just some game you’re playing for status points? What did you do, promise the Queen Mother you’d marry me off to her grandson if she beat you at poker?’
Iris reached out and grabbed her wrist. Startled, Miriam froze. Her mother’s hand felt hot, bony, as weak as a sparrow: ‘No, never that! But if you knew what it was like to grow up here, fifty years ago . . .’
Miriam surprised herself: ‘Suppose you tell me?’ Go on, justify yourself, she willed. There were butterflies in her stomach. Whatever was coming, it was bound to be bad.
Her mother nodded thoughtfully. Then her lips quirked in the first sign of a smile Miriam had seen since she’d arrived.
‘You know how the Clan braids its families, one arranged first-cousin marriage after another to keep the bloodline strong.’ Miriam nodded. ‘And you know what this means: the meddling old grannies.’
‘But Mom, Henryk and Angbard – ’
‘Hush. I know about the breeding program. Angbard told me about it. He’s not stupid enough to think he can push it through without . . . without allies. In another ten years the first of the babies will be coming up for adoption. He needs to convince the meddling old grannies to accept them, or we’ll be finished as a trading network within another couple of generations. So he asked me for advice. I’m his consultant, I guess. I don’t think most of the families realize just how close to the edge we are, how badly the civil war damaged us. Small gene pool, insufficient numbers – it’s not looking good. I’ve seen the numbers. If we don’t do something about it, the Clan will be extinct within two centuries.’ Her voice hardened. ‘But then you barged right in, doing what you do – investigating. Yes, I know it’s what you did for a living for all those years, but you’ve got to understand, you can’t do that right now. Not here, it’s much too dangerous. People here who really want to keep secrets tend to react violently to intruders. And there’s a flip side to the coin. I know you and the-bitch-my-mother don’t get on well’ – a twinkle in her eye as she said this; Miriam bit her tongue – ‘but Hildegarde is just doing what she’s always done, playing the long game, defending her status. Which is tenuous here because we are, let’s face it, women. Here in the Gruinmarkt – hell, everywhere in the whole wide world – power comes with a big swinging dick. We, you and me, we’re badly adjusted misfits: you’ve got the illusion that you’re anybody’s social equal and I, I’ve been outside . . .’
She fell silent. Miriam shook her head. ‘This isn’t like you, Mom.’ ‘This place isn’t like me, kid. No, listen: what happens to the Clan if Angbard, or his successor, starts introducing farmed baby world-walkers in, oh, ten years’ time? Without tying them in to the existing great families, without getting the old bitches to take them in and adopt them as their own? And what happens a generation down the line when they become adults?’
Miriam frowned. ‘Um. We have lots more world-walkers?’ ‘Nuts. You’re not thinking like a politician: it shifts the balance of power, kid, that’s what happens. And it shifts it away from the braids, away from the meddling old grannies – away from us. It’s ugly out there, Miriam, I don’t think you’ve seen enough of the Gruinmarkt to realize just how nasty this world is if you’re a woman. We’re insulated by wealth and privilege, we have a role in the society of the Clan. But if you take that all away we are, well . . . it’s not quite
as bad as Afghanistan under those Taliban maniacs, but it’s not far off. This is what I’m getting at when I talk about the long game. It’s the game the old women of the Clan have been playing for a century and a half now, and the name of the game is preserving the status of their granddaughters. Do you want a measure of control over your own life? Because if so, you’ve got to beat the old bitches at their own game. And that’s’ – Iris’s voice wavered – ‘difficult. I’ve been trying to help you, but then you kicked the foundations out from underneath my position . . .’
‘I –’ Miriam paused. ‘What is your position? Is it the medicines?’
‘I take it you’ve met Dr. ven Hjalmar?’
‘Yes.’ Miriam tensed.
‘Who do you think he works for? And who do you think I get my meds from? Copaxone and prednisone, by the grace of Hildegarde. If there’s an accident in the supply chain, a courier gets caught out and I go short – well, that’s all she wrote.’ Iris made a sharp cutting gesture.
‘Mom!’ Miriam stared, aghast.
‘Blackmail is just business as usual,’ Iris said with heavy irony. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you it’s not pretty, but would you get the message?’
‘But –’ Miriam was half out of her chair with anger. ‘Can’t you get Angbard to help you out? Surely they can’t stop you crossing over and visiting a doctor – ’
‘Shush, Miriam. Sit down, you’re making me itch.’ Miriam forced herself to untense: she sat down again on the edge of her chair, leaning forward. ‘If I bring Angbard into this, I lose. Because then I owe him, and I’ve dragged him into the game, do you see? Look, the rules are really very simple. You grow up hating and fearing your grandmother. Then she marries you off to some near-stranger. You lie back and let him fuck you until you get pregnant a time or three. A generation later, you have your own grandchildren and you realize you’ve got to hurt them just the way your own great-aunts and grandmother hurt you, or you’ll be doing them an even worse disservice; if you don’t, then instead of a legacy of some degree of power all they’ll inherit is the status of elderly has-been chattel. That is what the braid system means, Miriam. You’re – you’re old enough and mature enough to understand this. I wasn’t, I was about sixteen when my great-aunt – my grandmother was dead by then – leaned on the-bitch-my-mother and twisted her arm and made her give me reason to hate her.’
‘Um. It sounds like –’ Miriam winced and rubbed her forehead. ‘There’s something about this in game theory, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’ Iris looked thoughtful. ‘I told Morris about it, years ago. He called it an iterated cross-generational prisoner’s dilemma. That haunted me, you know. Your father was a very smart man. And kind.’
Miriam nodded; she missed him. Not that he was her real father. Her real father had been killed in an ambush by assassins shortly after Miriam’s birth, the incident that had prompted Iris to run away and go to ground in Boston, where she’d met and lived with Morris and brought Miriam up in ignorance of her background. But Morris had died years ago, and now . . .
‘When I gave you the locket I didn’t expect you to jump straight in and get caught up in the Clan so rapidly. I was going to warn you off. But once you got picked up, there wasn’t much else I could do. So I called up Angbard and came back in. I figure I’m not good for many more years, even with the drugs, but while I’m around I can watch your back. Do you see?’
‘That was a mistake, it would seem.’
‘Oh yes.’ Iris was silent for almost a minute. ‘Because there are no grandchildren, and in the terms of the game that means I’m not a full player. I thought for a while your business plans on the other side would serve instead, but there’s the glass ceiling again: you’re a woman. You’ve set yourself up to do something that just isn’t in the rules, so lots of people want to take you down. They want to make you play the game, to conform to expectations, because that reinforces their own role. If you don’t conform, you threaten them, so they’ll use that as an excuse to destroy you. And now they’ve got me as a hostage to use against you.’
‘Oh. Oh dear.’
‘You can say that again.’ Iris reached out and tugged a bellpull. There was a distant chime. ‘Do you want some lunch while you’re here? I wouldn’t blame you if all this has put you off your appetite . . .’
*
Miriam succumbed to depression on the way back to her prison. The sedan chair felt like a microcosm for her life right now, boxed in and darkly claustrophobic, the walls pressing tighter on every side, forcing her into a coerced and unwilling conformity. When she was very young she’d sometimes played the I’m really a Disney princess but I was swapped at birth for a commoner make-believe game. Somehow it had never involved being locked inside a swaying leather-lined box that smelled of old sweat and potpourri, her freedom restricted and her independence denied. The idea that once people decided you were going to be a princess, or a countess, your life stopped being your own, your body stopped being private, had never occurred to her back when she was a kid. I need to talk to someone, Miriam realized. Someone other than Iris, who right now was in as much of a mess as she was. Otherwise I am going to go crazy.
It had not escaped her attention that there were no sharp-edged implements in any of the rooms she had access to.
When they let her out in the walled courtyard, Miriam looked up at the sky above the gatehouse. The air was close and humid, and the clouds had a distinct yellowish tinge: the threat of thunder hung like a blanket across the city. ‘You’d better go in,’ said the ferret, in a rare sign of solicitude. Or maybe he just wanted to get her under cover and call a guard so that he could catch some rest.
‘Right.’ Miriam climbed the staircase back to her rooms tiredly, drained of both energy and optimism.
‘Milady!’ Miriam looked up as the doors closed behind her with a thud. ‘Oh! You look sad! Are you unwell? What’s wrong?’
It was Kara, her young, naive lady-in-waiting. Miriam managed a tired smile. ‘It’s a long story,’ she said. Gradually she realized there was something odd about Kara. ‘Hey, what happened to your hair?’ Kara had worn it long, down her back: now it was bundled up in an intricate coil atop her head. And she was wearing traditional dress. Kara loved to try imported American fashions.
‘Do you like it? It’s for a wedding.’
‘Oh? Whose?’
‘Mine. I’m to be married tomorrow.’ Kara began to cry – not happily, but the quiet sobbing of desperation.
‘What!’ The next thing Miriam knew, she was hugging Kara while the younger woman shuddered, sniffling, her face pressed against Miriam’s shoulder. ‘Come on, relax, you can let it all out. Tell me about it.’ She gently steered Kara toward the bench seat under the window. Glancing around, she realized that the servants had made themselves scarce. ‘You’re going to have to tell me how you convinced them to let you in here. Hell, you’re going to have to tell me how you found me. But not right now. Calm down. What’s this about a wedding?’
That set Kara off again. Miriam gritted her teeth. Why me? Why now? The first was easy: Miriam had unwittingly designated herself as adult role model when she first met Kara. The second question, though –
‘My father – after you disappeared last week – he summoned me urgently. I know the match was not his idea, for last we spoke he said I should perhaps wait another summer, but now he said his mind was made up and that a week hence I should be married into a braid alliance. He seemed quite pleased until I protested, but he said you had written that you no longer wanted me and that I should best find a new home for myself! I, I could not believe that! Tell me, milady, it isn’t true, is it?’
‘It’s not true,’ Miriam confirmed, stroking her hair. ‘Be still. I didn’t write to your father.’ I’ll bet someone else did, though. ‘Isn’t this a bit sudden? I mean, don’t these things take time to arrange? Who’s the lucky man, anyway?’ You haven’t been sneaking a boyfriend, have you? she wanted to ask, but that seemed a little
blunt given Kara’s delicate state of mind.
‘It’s sudden.’ Kara sniffled against her shoulder for a while. ‘I’ve never met the man,’ she wailed quietly.
‘What, never?’
‘Ouch! No, never!’ Miriam forced herself to relax her grip as Kara continued. ‘He’s called Raph ven Wu, second son of Paulus ven Wu, and he’s ten years older than me and I’ve never met him and what if I hate him? It’s all about money. Granma says not to worry and it will all work out – ’
‘Your grandmother talked to you?’
‘Yes, Granma Elise is really kind and she says he’s a well-mannered knight who she has known since he was a babe and who is honorable and will see to my welfare – but he’s terribly old! He’s almost thirty. And I’m afraid, I’m afraid –’ Her lower lip was quivering again. ‘Granma says it will be all right but I just don’t know. And the wedding’s to be tomorrow, in the Halle Temple of Our Lady of the Dead, and I want you to come. Will you be there?’ She held on to Miriam like a drowning woman clutching at a life raft.
‘You didn’t say how you found me,’ Miriam prodded gently.
‘Oh, I petitioned Baron Henryk! He said you were staying here and I could see you if I wanted. He even said I should invite you to witness at my wedding. Will you come? Please?’
Oh, so that’s what it’s about. To Miriam the message couldn’t have been clearer. And she had no doubt at all that it was a message, and that she was the intended recipient. She looked out of the window, turning her head so that Kara wouldn’t see her expression. ‘I’ll come if they let me,’ she said, surprising herself with the mildness of her tone.
‘Of course they’ll let you!’ Kara said fiercely. ‘Why wouldn’t they? Are you in trouble, milady?’
‘You could say that.’ Miriam thought about it for a moment. ‘But probably no worse than yours.’
The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) Page 24