by Trevor Veale
The servant led them down another corridor adorned with tapestries. The whole place had an embalmed look, as if it had died and been mummified. After climbing a flight of oak stairs, the servant left them to their three rooms, shaking his head at the mud they had left on the carpet.
“He looks like a ghost, man,” Anton stage-whispered. “This whole place is so spooky, it’s creeping me out.”
“I think your cousin’s old-world courtesy is charming,” Lucinda said to Catheter, who looked at her adoringly. He and Lucinda quickly disappeared into one of the rooms.
Anton slung his backpack on the bed in one of the remaining rooms. “Might as well text that bitch, Hernia,” he said to himself. “See if I can get a shag.”
He wrestled his cellphone from his pocket and began thumbing numbers and letters. He punched the Send button, laid the phone on his nightstand and stretched out on the bed. Soon he was dozing, and was only awakened by the reverberation of the lunch gong. Down in the cavernous dining room, where swags and plaster garlands adorned the upper walls, an elaborate seven-course lunch was being served. When Anton strolled in, Catheter, Lucinda and the old duke were already tucking in. The old duke’s shriveled face broke into a smile and he beckoned Anton to his seat with a bony finger.
Midway through the meal, an elderly servant in green brass-buttoned livery appeared.” It is not my wish to disturb Your Grace,” he said, “but I bring grave news.”
“Whatever can that be?” the duke said, head bobbing over his devilled quails.
“Sir, Their Majesties the King and Queen of Melloria have been taken prisoner by the Slobodians and are being transported to Duodenum Palace.”
“Ha! They must’ve taken the wrong road!” Anton said. “I bet that pothead Simpkins drove ‘em to the wrong border.”
“Oh dear, Mummy and Daddy are up shit creek,” Catheter muttered to Lucinda, and continued munching on a quail.
The duke lurched to his feet and addressed his three guests. “If there is anything I can do to assist in the present situation regarding Their Majesties, I am at your disposal,” he cried.
“Thank you, Your Grace, but the only thing we can do now is wait and hope,” Catheter replied. “Meanwhile, I think we’ll just finish our lunch and wait for the limo to take Anton and myself to King Hector’s palace, where no doubt my wife and son will be waiting…” His voice trailed off on a miserable note. “And I have to be returning with my horses to Melloria,” Lucinda chirped up.
An hour later a Bentley bearing the royal crest of the House of Lattis rolled up outside. The driver saluted the two princes, and told them he was to convey them to Porcellan Palace. Catheter thanked the driver, kissed Lucinda and they climbed in after saying goodbye to Cousin Ferdy. Lucinda watched them drive away, her face watery with tears.
Chapter 44
The Slovos At Home
Queen Letitia was feeling worse than at any time since she was admitted to the mental hospital. The troop transporter carrying her and Godfrey to who knows where bounced over the rough road that marked their introduction to Slobodia, and the soldiers in the front sat huddled in glowering hostility. The driver looked a bit crazy, she thought. She’d seen enough crazy people during her stay at the home – and they were on the staff! The driver had a mouthful of silver teeth and it looked like he’d been in plenty of fights.
She heartily disliked the Slobodians, with their high Slavic cheekbones and broad faces. Their eyes were small, and few of them looked intelligent, in her opinion. Despite their clumsy attempts at bonhomie, everything about the Slobodians reeked of corruption and indiscipline. There was a nasty undertone of brutality in the way they yelled mocking insults whenever the truck sped past some down-at-heel beggar at the roadside. She felt outraged the first time this happened, and made a point of giving each beggar they overtook a cheerful wave.
One of the soldiers passed a pack of cheap cigarettes around, and soon strong-smelling tobacco smoke billowed from the front of the truck – another source of annoyance. They also sang obscene triumphant army songs – Today We Take Melloria was a particular favorite – and she knew they were singing it to rile their passengers.
Sitting in the cramped rear seats was so uncomfortable that she wondered how long she would be able to keep going without seizing up. Godfrey was seated across from her, staring out the window, and when they slammed over potholes and ruts in the road, and had to cling hard to the armrests of their seats, she worried about him with his stomach cramps and dyspepsia.
“Hell’s teeth!” Godfrey groaned, clutching the sides of his seat. “This is like some appalling nightmare.”
“How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“Hung over and incredibly thirsty,” he muttered. “I wish they’d give us something to drink – my throat’s as dry as an old maid’s tit.”
“I know how you feel,” she whispered.
Godfrey sighed. “Last night on the road to freedom – before we ran into these blackguards, I was full of hope and optimism. Now it feels like doom is riding me like a demon, weighing me down.”
She leaned across and patted his shoulder. “Chin up, old thing,” she said. “Mustn’t let them think we’re losing heart.”
She fell silent and watched the dull landscape: long stretches of grassland and occasional trees flashing by, and she knew in her heart she could offer very little comfort to Godfrey. She periodically felt the faint fluttering that preceded nausea, but she had nothing left to expel, so she prepared herself for the dry heaves. To distract herself, she addressed the soldiers in the front of the truck.
“Where exactly are you taking us?”
She had images in her mind that she didn’t like to entertain: a ghastly cement block building with damp walls, a gray prison yard, a blank wall with dried blood on it, a firing squad. Her heart was hammering.
The soldiers in the front began whispering to each other. Finally the one who had so roughly manhandled her said: “You are going to Duodenum Palace, the royal residence of the House of Slovo.”
Her eyebrows shot up, then knitted together. She felt abhorrence. She hoped they would be able to stand up to whatever brutality King Slobodan and his court might throw at them.
Godfrey was now settling down for the journey. He was sleeping fitfully through the bumpy ride, having woken up once, sleep-fuddled and declared: “We must be inspecting a military parade today – there are so many soldiers.” At this the soldiers had shaken their steel-helmeted heads and laughed.
Letitia started mentally calculating how long it would take to get to Duodenum. She had only been there once and it had taken two hours by plane from Melloria City, so it must be an awfully long drive from the border. What made it worse was the fierce wind that blew down on them from those unending stretches of grassland – the Slobodian steppes. The notorious Slobodian wind – blamed for many a harsh Mellorian winter – slammed at them in a stinging fine-grained roar that whistled around the truck. They kept going against its onslaught, and as the wind grew louder, small rocks hurtled against the windshield, bouncing across their view of the road. The soldiers huddled in the front of the truck seemed subdued by the force of the screaming wall of air.
Outside Letitia noticed women working in the fields, muffled like muslims against the wind. The first village appeared, and the few people out on the dust-blown street had all tied on handkerchiefs, scarves, anything against the maddening blast that fought with them. A vehicle passed them too closely on the other side of the road and the soldier who was driving leaned his head out the window, yelling – but his voice was snatched away and tossed around. People on the street gestured to each other in sign language. Talking was useless. Words were torn away as soon as they were uttered.
The truck clattered over a bridge spanning a dirty brown river. The river must be irrigating these damn yellow plains, Letitia pondered, noticing fields of arable land stretching out to right and left. Groups of wind-tortured men and women worked the fields, turning
over the ground with hoes. They looked weak and exhausted by their exertions, but they stopped and bowed wearily as the truck sped by. These obsequious attentions were ignored by the soldiers who laughed at the peasants and shouted Slobodian curses. “Eat dirt, you petrified pieces of pigshit!” was one that rang in Letitia’s ears.
The wind died down and fields containing tall rows of sunflowers replaced the arable ones, and they soon began passing strings of cement buildings that Letitia surmised were apartment blocks. Factories with billowing smokestacks overshadowed them, and here and there an ancient-looking building broke the monotonous world of industry and populations. For the most part the buildings looked grimy and cheap.
The road they were trundling along broadened out and joined a vast cloverleaf of whizzing four-lane traffic, making Letitia feel nauseous. Below them as they crossed the cloverleaf, flimsy shanties alternated with billboards proclaiming dream-fulfilling luxuries. The contrast between the dire poverty of the underclasses and the triumphant consumerism of the rulers couldn’t have been starker. Near the clumps of shanties women were washing laundry in a ditch. An old woman in a headscarf caught Letitia’s eye who had braved the buzzing traffic to set up a table at the roadside selling slices of watermelon. They’re probably going for ridiculously low prices, she thought.
The drone of the traffic and the haze of diesel fumes were giving her a headache, to add to her upset stomach. So it came as a relief when they suddenly stopped. The driver, laughing and joking with the others in the front, had smacked into the rear of a delivery van. Letitia jerked forward in her seat belt, but Godfrey, who had neglected to buckle up, was projected halfway down the aisle like a human cannonball. There was a moment of absolute silence, then a great gust of laughter exploded among the soldiers. Godfrey seethed with anger as he groped his way back to his seat, sensing that the laughter was laced with contempt.
The soldier who had been driving jumped out and began arguing with the van driver. While the argument continued, other traffic rattled past them: a truckful of armed soldiers who hooted obscenities, a man driving three-wheeled car, a dented pickup overflowing with dour peasants. The soldier who had roughhandled her opened the side door for Letitia to step outside. Godfrey, still fuming, was left to stagger out on his own. The air reeked of traffic smells, but she moved quickly from the truck and was soon walking away from the yawning, stretching soldiers. She wanted nothing more to do with them, and found a quiet spot at the side of the road. When she felt sufficiently apart from the others, she turned and watched the two drivers arguing.
A small boy of about eight or ten dressed in rags approached her and held out his hand. She dipped into her purse and found a few coins to place in the boy’s palm. As the boy looked up and smiled, the soldier who had been rough with her marched over and callously grabbed the boy’s neck. The boy sobbed as his coins were taken off him; then the soldier kicked him away and began chastising Letitia for giving money to a beggar. “They’re nothing but scum,” he said with a sneer. She turned her back on him, speechless with anger.
The argument between the two drivers was finally settled after one of the soldiers lifted his automatic rifle and fired a few rounds into the air. The van driver got the point and paid a hefty bribe. Then he drove off and the passengers were herded back on board. The journey continued, and they soon reached the outskirts of Slovograd, the Slobodian capital. We won’t be long getting to the palace, thank God, Letitia told herself as she watched the crowded urban streets flow past. She noticed that images of King Slobodan were ubiquitous on gigantic hoardings from which his face beamed over the populace, on mammoth stone effigies, on the front pages of newspapers that she glimpsed on passing newsstands, and, along with pictures of his son, Prince Royston, on the covers of glossy magazines.
The face of King Slobodan was too profane and sensual to be handsome, even if he were several decades younger. Letitia considered even the touched-up versions of his physiognomy on the shiny covers of Celebrity and Society and Illustrated Weekly were ugly. There was something coarse about the nose, the mouth was set in a sneer and the eyes too often concealed behind dark lenses. Passing a giant billboard with the king’s face on it, she noted that his green tinted glasses looked cheap.
They approached an overcrowded intersection and the vehicle slowed to a crawl. A large throng of people were making it impossible to advance, and the driver angrily sounded his horn. The people barely moved, acting as if they had been ordered to block the road. Up ahead, a marching squad of green-clad troops were stamping past the intersection to the blare of a military band. The truck and its occupants had to wait a full twenty minutes before the milling crowd broke up, as if by order.
“Too many fucking people!” one of the soldiers said to the driver.
“No worries, mate – we’ll resettle that fucking lot once we establish Greater Slobodia.”
The driver’s words, and its reference to the planned annexation of Melloria, had the other soldiers smirking. Several twisted their heads around and flicked glances at the passengers, to see their reaction.
Godfrey’s face tightened with suppressed rage, and Letitia nudged him sharply. “Don’t make any comment,” she said.
Presently they rattled through plantations of plum trees, their autumn fruit purple and ripe for plucking. They were part of a huge park and Letitia caught the smell of burning leaves. It was a crisp sunny afternoon and the air smelled damp and mellow. She thought of camping holidays in England when she was a child and felt a wave of nostalgia wash over her. It made her feel intoxicated and slightly delirious. They were now driving through extensive orchards, the trees pimply with fruit. Very nice, she told herself, but where are the people? Other than a scattering of laborers, toiling in sweat-drenched shirts to pick apples, and a pair of uniformed outriders on motorcycles, who fell in discretely with the troop transporter, they saw no one. The laborers were stripping the fruit from the trees into large plastic sacks.
A huge stone arch stretched above the road. Massive steel gates, operated by remote control, slowly opened as the truck passed through. Beyond the arch, a long avenue of oak trees led up to the perimeter of a huge palace. Flags on long white poles unfurled to right and left the whole length of the avenue. They drove over a hump-backed bridge with stone columns at either end, each topped with a bronze double axhead, the emblem of Slobodia. There seem to be plenty of old battleaxes about, Letitia thought and stifled a snicker. For some reason, she thought of her sister-in-law, Queen Latrina, her of the disgusting personal habits. One of them was squeezing her nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing down a glutinous silver string which dribbled to the floor. It was as if she’d never heard of a handkerchief, Letitia thought.
The last time they had met, Letitia had been repelled by Latrina’s fetid odor and had asked her if she ever washed her hair. Of course, she replied – once a year in fermented human urine. Apparently it was an old Slobodian custom designed to promote fertility. The result had been their son, Royston – ghastlier outcome she couldn’t imagine. She began helplessly to giggle, and soon she was convulsed. Since Royston was Slobodian and was Latrina’s only child, the smelly fertility treatment had clearly produced a stinker! After her fit of giggles had subsided, she felt a little abashed. She knew she shouldn’t give way to frivolity like this, when she and her husband were taken into the very heart of an enemy country.
Duodenum Palace, which seemed endless, was a massive fortress that had been the seat of the Slovos for centuries. Its turrets with their slit windows gave it a dark and dangerous air and its battlements were the spikiest Letitia had ever seen. She thought it the ugliest palace in the world. With its gargoyles, towers, turrets, chimneys, vanes and flagpoles, she considered it a vastly-overdone wart erupting from the quiet greenery of the surrounding park. Its façade was an excess of gothic ornamentation and its crenellations and domed towers were in the worst possible taste.
They were now approaching a huge pair
of brass-studded oak gates, spiked with steel, which creaked slowly open to admit them. Letitia noticed that the soldiers were becoming more relaxed. She guessed they were looking forward to handing their awkward prisoners over to the Praetorians, King Slobodan’s feared and brutal personal troops. The one who had been nasty to her and the beggar boy and who had throughout the ride fluctuated between silence and sullen aggression, now twisted his head around and nodded to his passengers.
“This is your new home,” he joked, indicating a courtyard flagged with gray stone and the other soldiers laughed. He pulled out a bottle of brandy from his knapsack and offered it to Godfrey. Letitia glowered and watched her husband uncap the bottle and bring it up to his mouth, swallowing for many seconds. He belched and handed the bottle back to the soldier. Although she had no wish to converse with any of the soldiers, being a person who recoiled instinctively from the raucousness, jostling and perspiration of uncouth people, she decided to address the soldier with the bottle. She asked him whether she could make a phone call to Bulimia from the palace, to inquire if her sons had arrived.
“Bulimia?” the soldier said, reacting to the word as if he’d been made to swallow a bitter pill. “I spit upon Bulimia!” Perhaps discretion really is the better part of valor, she thought, and lapsed into silence.
The truck pulled to a halt in the courtyard. The soldiers got out and one of them motioned for the passengers to leave. They scrambled out of the truck and were confronted by a line of uniformed Praetorian Guard, looking exceptionally mean. The Prets, as they were called, wore dark gray uniforms, a silver axhead embedded in black tabs on their collars. An officer who had been standing stiffly beside an inner gate, gestured to the couple.