She stood straight, so that she could look Jume Metra in the eye, and said:
"What now?"
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She had to imagine the warrior woman's grudging admiration; Metra's doggedly inexpressive features gave no sign of it. The warrior pointed to one of the shadowy piles.
"The packs we took from your horses are there," she said.
"Dress yourself in clean clothes."
"I need cold water to drink and warm water to wash in," Lucrezia said, 'and food to eat. How long is it since I was stung? "
Metra made a brusque sign to her two companions, who must have been standing by in expectation of such requests; neither had to take more than half a dozen steps. One fetched a broad bowl, the other a drinking-flask and a plate. The water in the bowl was barely lukewarm; the drinking-flask contained a liquid as syrupy in viscosity as it was in taste; the stuff on the plate wasn't bread.
Metra turned on her heel and left. The other women stayed to help as Lucezia peeled off her dirty clothes. Lucrezia had to accept the help which they offered; she barely had the strength to sort through the packs.
It was one of the workers who said: "Thirteen days have passed since they found you in the forest. The warriors brought you as speedily as they could.
There isn't much time. We must quit the nest, and soon."
Lucrezia peered at the woman wonderingly, wishing that she could see her more clearly.
"You're human," she said, as if it were a marvel.
"You speak as a human addressing a fellow-human."
"Don't be afraid," the second worker said.
"We mean you no harm."
Lucrezia touched the wound at her neck, where the drago mite had stabbed her.
It was almost healed. It wasn't unduly sensitive to her touch, but she could feel a scar.
"What was that thing which stung me?" she asked.
"It wasn't a warrior or a worker?"
"It was a drone," the first worker told her.
"It was in command of the warriors," Lucrezia said, carefully not framing the guess as a question.
"It was the drone, not the warriors, who decided that I should be brought here." In the meantime, she rummaged in the packs which had been taken from Hyry Keshvara's donkeys, searching for something to wear which would not look too absurd. Hyry Keshvara had owned no clothes 383
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that were suitable^fpr a
princess to wear when confronting a queen, nor was there anything in her luggage which qualified as a good fit.
"Drones are subject to the queen," the second worker said.
"We are all the children of the queen. We are all of one mind here."
Lucrezia hesitated briefly over the choice, but there was little scope for indecision. Given that she had no alternative but to seem austere, she elected to be uncompromising about it. She picked out Hyry's plainest shirt and a severely functional but loosely fitting jacket to wear over it. She could only find one skirt, and that was too long, but it offered a better option than trousers whose legs would be too long.
"Would that be the mound-queen?" she asked, trying to recall exactly whatJume Metra had said to her in the forest.
"Or do you mean the drago mite queen?"
"We are all of one mind here," the worker repeated.
"The mound-queen is the voice of the drago mite queen."
Was that what Metra had said? Lucrezia struggled to remember, wishing that the sin of forgetfulness were not so very easy to commit. She transferred her belt, with all its accoutrements, and the few ornaments she had been wearing. She had managed to wash the worst of the dirt out of her hair with the same soap she had used on her body, but it was still in poor condition and there was no way to dry it, so she tied it back.
"All right," she said, when she felt that she was as presentable as she could be, in the circumstances.
"I'm ready. What now?"
"Come this way," the second worker said.
"Don't be afraid. The queen will explain everything."
Lucrezia didn't bother to ask which queen they were talking about.
After all, everyone was all of one mind here. The voice of one, it seemed, was the voice of all. And yet, they were human- even Jume Metra, who evidently believed that the status of warrior excused every discourtesy. My father's ministers always said that the game of diplomacy was difficult, she reminded herself. She tried not to think too hard about where she was and what her chances were of ever seeing the sky again. She had been told not to be afraid, and she was doing her best to take the advice.
The journey to the mound-queen's throne room was a short one- no more than two hundred steps, although the route was full 384
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of twists and turns.
They had brought her to the very threshold of her destination. That was convenient, given that she ached so badly in every limb, but she didn't doubt that they had done it to save the queen's impatience rather than for her benefit.
The workers led her into a much larger chamber than the one where she had awakened. Now that her eyes had grown more accustomed to the peculiar light the space seemed rather dimly lit, because its glowing ceiling was so high and the light of its walls was interrupted by a crowd of onlookers. Metra was there, and a dozen other warriors. The workers who had brought her pushed her forward, but they stepped back to join the warriors by the wall.
The mound-queen had a throne of sorts. It was by no means as grand as the monarch of Xandria's ceremonial seat but it was the only chair in the chamber, just as Belin's was, and it too was raised upon a dais so that its seated occupant could look down upon the heads of her standing subjects.
Like Belin, the queen made up for the ordinariness of her features with the ornamentation of her dress; she wore a helmet, like Metra's, but much more so: a surreal impression of a drago mite head, with 'antennae' and pal ps Her court, like Belin's, included the un human as well as the human, but where the Xandrian king had guardian giants the mound-queen had drago mites two of them, both of the same relatively small and deceptively meek kind as the one which had stung her. They were standing on their four hind legs to either side of the throne, with their heads raised high above the queen's.
The queen was very fat. It was impossible to tell how old she might be, but she wasn't young. She was golden, but very pale. Her throne and its supportive dais seemed to be growing out of the floor of the chamber and she somehow gave the impression of growing out of the throne: it was as if the whole ensemble were some kind of weird unearthly excrescence.
Lucrezia was decidedly unsettled by the sight of the mound- queen, even though there were so many similarities between this occasion and her audiences with her father that she felt she ought to have been able to laugh.
It would have been easy enough to see this display as an exercise in tawdry and ineffectual imitation, if only the two patient drago mites had not been there, with their 'hands' pressed together. She wondered whether one of them was 385
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the one which had^ stung her and if so, which. They seemed absolutely identical, mirror-images of one another. Their presence here, whether dominant or subordinate, implied that the mound- queen did indeed have real power, of a kind which even Belin of Xandria could not command.
"Your name is Lucrezia," the mound-queen said, without undue ceremony.
"You are from the place called Xandria, in the far north.
Are you high-born among your people? "
"Yes I am," Lucrezia answered warily.
"You were a prisoner of the river men. Our warriors rescued you."
"Did they rescue me? " the princess answered, trying not to sound accusing.
"It seemed to me that they merely took possession of me.
The Eblans wouldn't have hurt me. "
"Perhaps you do not understand what manner of men the river people are," the queen said sharply, leaning forward slightly. "Perhaps they told you that they live in cities, and cold you that they were civilised. They are savages, who hate all other human beings. They fight incessantly among themselves, and they kill drago mites whenever they see them. They kill us whenever they see us if they can. They attacked our workers when they passed by our mound. It seems that the pale people who live in the purple forest are no different." j And what of your own warriors? Lucrezia thought. All I have seen of their conduct has been naked brutality.
"The river people told me that their intentions were peaceful," she said aloud.
"They too were mortally afraid of the forest people, but they declared themselves anxious to make friendly contact with Xandria. The dark landers are usually peaceful coo but they're mortally afraid of drago mites and when they saw that your people were allied with drago mite invaders they couldn't help jumping to the conclusion that they were being threatened by strange enemies. Had your emissaries approached them more carefully they'd have been made welcome." She was not certain that this was true, but it seemed the most diplomatic line to follow.
The mound-queen was uninterested in open debate.
"How many queens has Xandria?" she asked abruptly.
"By tradition," Lucrezia answered, 'thirry-and-one. But that leaves out of account the petty queens of the Thousand Isles. "
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"The Corridors of Power," the mound-queen said, 'had eighty sister-queens, and every queen had a hundred thousand daughters and more.
Every worker and every warrior in the quiet nests had a million sisters to share her quietness. "
Lucrezia noted her use of the past tense, but thought it best to make no direct comment on it.
"Your daughters and your sisters have suffered dire misfortune," she observed.
"It gives me no pleasure to learn of it, I assure you. I'm not your enemy."
"We have many enemies," the queen said, 'but we do not count you one of them.
You shall help us. You shall be one of us. Perhaps you shall be our salvation. "
Lucrezia would have been happier had these observations been phrased as questions rather than as statements, but she didn't feel that the time was ripe for contradiction.
"How might I do that?" she asked.
"We have not forgotten Xandria," the mound-queen said.
"We know that there is a land beyond the forest a good land, flat and empty.
The plague from the south has destroyed everything, and the Corridors of Power are all but empty. Nest-wars have reduced our strength, but there are nests in the north which still have far more warriors than they can feed.
They cannot go into the forest, so they will come south. What little remains they will claim, and we can no longer resist them. But we remember Xandria, and we understand what the blind queens cannot. We understand that the forest is a barrier and not a boundary, and that safety lies on its further side. We are not blind; we can see the way to a new beginning. When you are one with us you shall guide us to Xandria, where the hills shall rise again from the empty plain, and the Corridors of Power shall be renewed."
"The plains north of the forest aren't empty," Lucrezia said, fighting to remain calm although she understood perfectly well what the mound-queen was saying to her.
"People live there as many as the land can accommodate. I'm not sure that you understand what I meant when I said that Xandria has thirty-and-one queens. It has only one king, but he is the ruler of five million people.
The cities of the north are metal-rich and they have huge armies. You can't just march through the forest and start erecting drago mite mounds on the northern plain. The people whose land you try to take will resist you and their neighbours won't be slow to help."
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"You shall speak for us," the mound-queen said.
"We shall not come as invaders, but as guests. We shall not come as enemies, but as friends."
// won't be easy to persuade the people ofKhalorn to see things that way, Lucrezia thought sourly. It would be no less difficult to stand before Belin's throne to tell him that he must welcome drago mites into his realm than it is to stand here to tell you that he will not.
"You would be better to go south," she said.
"The plague came from the south," the mound-queen replied. "There are huge marshlands there, which are difficult to cross."
"Xandria will not welcome you, majesty," Lucrezia said, feeling that she had little alternative but to make that clear.
"If you need a new home, you had better look to the south. If the plague is like the epidemics which sometimes sweep through the nations of the north, it may well be safer to go where it has already done its worst and passed by than to flee before it. Whether or not the forest can serve as a barrier, there is a danger that you will carry its seeds with you to the northern lands."
"You shall be our guide," the mound-queen told her stubbornly. "We shall have horses and donkeys, and two carts. Your sisters will also be united with us. There f, little time. You shall be a queen in your own land, daughter." , There was a moment when Lucrezia couldn't quite work this out, although she was quite certain that she didn't want to be one of the mound-women, even if it meant becoming a queen. It was the second sentence which puzzled her.
"What carts?" she asked guardedly.
"I had only horses and donkeys when your warriors captured me."
"We shall have many more," the mound-queen said.
"The greater number of the drones must be eliminated, but there are three of your sisters numbered in the company, now that the giant has rejoined them."
Lucrezia was still confused.
"Dhalla?" she said uncertainly.
"Has Dhalla come searching for me? She's with Fraxinus, isn't she? You're talking about Fraxinus's caravan. You're going to kill them all! You mustn't do that!"
"Not all," the mound-queen said serenely.
"Your sisters shall be one with us, and shall keep two drones, as custom permits."
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"No!" Lucrezia objected.
"You mustn't do that. It's a terrible mistake. If you need help and I believe you do you mustn't kill Fraxinus and his men. They're the only ones really capable of helping you. If you make me one of you whatever that might mean- I'll cease to be of any use to you. You're going about this entirely the wrong way. If you want help, you must come to us as one human to another, to make a proper alliance. You can't just take us over. You can't just absorb us into the nest. If you do that, you're doomed.
Believe me- I know what's north of the forest, and you don't. I'm the one who understands this situation, not you. If you try to go north, whether you have horses and wagons or not, you'll have to run the gauntlet of the drago mite nests which you seem to count as enemies, then the dark landers and then the armed might of Xandria.
You'll all die every last one of you. You need Carus Fraxinus, and Aulakh Phar. You need their knowledge, their understanding. They'll be more use to you than I am. If you stick to the path you've chosen, you're finished. You have to think in a different way now- a new way. Don't kill the people in the caravan- join forces with them!
Accept them as friends. "
The mound-queen paused for thought. It was the fi
rst sign she had given that this really was a conversation, an exchange of ideas.
After a little while she said: "There are forest men with them- men who hate and fear us, by your own admission. Men who would try to kill us on sight."
"They never knew that it was possible for men and drago mites to live harmoniously together," Lucrezia said swiftly.
"Now that they know it, their attitude might change- but only if you will condescend to meet them face to face and prove to them that their fears are groundless." Except, of course, she reminded herself, that their fears aren't groundless at all, given your present intentions.
The old woman slumped, relaxing into the frame of her tawdry throne.
It seemed to shift slightly around her, welcoming her awkward bulk into its comforting embrace. There was a speculative gleam in the mound-queen's eye, but there was a cold smile playing about her lips which Lucrezia did not like at all. It was altogether too human for her liking. When Belin wore a smile like that, it boded ill for whoever happened to be in his thoughts.
"Don't act hastily, I beg of you," Lucrezia said.
"We must talk at 389
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length. You must understand what the world beyond the hills is like, for I fear that although you remember Xandria you have forgotten far too much."
"There is no time," the mound-queen said.
"You must make time," Lucrezia insisted.
"I will tell you everything I can, but there are people with those wagons far wiser than I, far better able to help you than I. Go to them, I beg you.
Hear what they have to say."
"We cannot do that," the mound-queen said.
"They would have to come here. Do you think they would do that, willingly?"
"Yes I do," Lucrezia said quickly knowing that it might prove to be a reckless promise.
"If you ask them in the right way, they will come. If you will let me go to them, I can bring them here. Let me do that, I beg you."
Serpent's Blood Page 47
