As our escort’s polished armor rattled and echoed in the hallway, which was so big that I expected to see a train headlight coming at us, I asked Bassin, “How’s your mother?”
“I haven’t seen her since her birthday party, eight months ago.”
The queen was pushing eighty by now, which was impressive, given the state of medicine on Bren. I had worn outã I /di combat boots that weren’t as tough as Marenna the Fourth. The first time I met her, the queen had been seventy-two and prickly. She said then that her temperament didn’t improve with age. She had aged, so I swallowed at the prospect of another audience.
Bassin shrugged. “She’s grumpier than ever, I suppose. But don’t worry. She’s always liked you.”
Bassin was kidding himself if he thought his mother would change her mind because that nice young man from Earth was visiting again.
The escort admitted us to the queen’s sitting room, then backed out as he pulled the double doors shut.
The queen’s parlor was bigger than Bassin’s, with better ceiling art, rimming a clear crystal dome through which cloud-patched blue showed. Her Majesty reclined on a divan centered below the dome, which matched the silver of her gown. She had her back to us, her head upturned toward the ceiling.
Bassin said, “Mother, it’s me. I was delayed.”
She didn’t say a word. We had arrived an extra hour early because Her Majesty genuinely didn’t tolerate tardiness any better than she tolerated barbarians at her gates.
Bassin muttered under his breath, then he walked to her, his heels clattering on the marble floor.
I stood fast. I’m no diplomat, but I’ve been at this long enough to know that a commoner doesn’t approach a queen unless bidden. Especially this queen.
Bassin said to her, “Don’t be like that. There’s still time to discuss this.”
Bassin reached the divan, stopped, hands on hips, and looked down at his mother.
His jaw slackened, his eyes widened. “Mother?”
He dropped to one knee, and touched her cheek. Then he started to shake, and tears welled in his eye.
I ran to the divan.
The queen, as slight and as brittle as ever, lay still with her eyes wide and staring to the sky.
I breached protocol, and laid my fingers on the royal cheek.
It was as cold as marble.
Bassin lay across his mother’s body, sobbing.
I breached protocol again, and patted my friend’s royal shoulder.
Only now he wasn’t just my friend. He was king.
THIRTY
NIGHT HAD FALLEN AS ORD, Howard, the Duck, and I slumped in a half circle of chairs upholstered in ochre dinosaur feathers, in Bassin’s parlor. A clock that looked like a calliope ticked, and the tick echoed off the dome above us. Beyond the palace, muffled bells chimed from every steeple in the city.
The royal physician, læe peather bag in hand, stepped out of Bassin’s bed chamber and we all stood. The doctor whispered something to the valet who sat in a straight backed chair outside Bassin’s door, patted his shoulder, then walked to me. “I’ve given His Majesty something to help him sleep. I’ve treated Bassin since he was four. Strong boy. He’ll be fine, tomorrow. Physically.”
“What happened to his mother?”
He tapped the back of his head, behind his ear. “There is a vessel, at the base of the brain. Increasingly fragile with age.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone like that.”
I nodded. “We call it a stroke.”
“Painless. A blessing.” He shook his head. “But for Marin . . .”
The Duck rubbed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Most of us have never known Marin without Her Majesty. And with the war, I don’t know . . .”
The doctor shook each of our hands, then left us.
The Duck shook his head, as he crossed his arms. “Well, I know. When Bassin wakes up, our deal’s as dead as his mother.” Then the Duck looked over at Howard, who was sucking on a nicotine-substitute lollipop, and said, “Colonel, if you expect to build a better Mousetrap, I suggest you bring your own shovel.”
Howard tugged the lollipop out of his mouth, and it made a little poink that echoed up to the parlor ceiling. “We still need the Cavorite, though. We’ll just give Bassin the Kodiaks, anyway.”
The Duck said, “No, we won’t. Our negotiating sideboards were very narrow. The Kodiaks may be buried in your budget, but State is in charge of treaties. We can’t cut a new deal to support hostilities. The Constitution reposits the war power with Congress, not you, and not with the rest of us here. Jason learned that lesson in Tibet.”
“Duck’s right, Howard.”
Howard studied his lollipop, then sighed. “The scourge of the universe is preparing to eradicate the human race, our new ally is collapsing into anarchy, our old allies are killing each other, our fleet is running out of gas, and our only fortress is a rock we can’t improve.”
The Duck sat with his elbows on his knees, chin cupped in his hands. “Thanks for cheering me up.”
Outside, the muffled bells rang in the dark. Howard said, “Well, I hear the funeral will be a show. Nobody on Bren would miss it.”
The Duck sat up straight, cocked his head, and stared at the tapestries hung on the parlor’s distant wall. “There is that.”
THIRTY-ONE
THE STATE FUNERAL of Marenna the Fourth was the first of its magnitude in nearly a century, but the royal household took it in stride. The trappings and protocols would replicate those for her mother’s funeral, and those for the funerals of every sovereign of Marin for two thousand years. But the Clans cremate their dead, and the timber for the royal pyre, which would resemble îfora small Egyptian pyramid, had to be gathered. And the dignitaries needed time to travel to Marinus.
So, it was a cool, cloudy morning a week after Bassin’s mother died that she would finally ascend to heaven as oily smoke. I stood in the second row of the halted cortège, behind the royal bier.
The royal bier was a gilded wagon with ten-foot tall, jewel encrusted wheels that had borne every monarch’s remains for a thousand years. The route never varied, from the Summer Palace, three miles down the Grand Boulevard of Marinus, lined today with four million mourners, to the royal pyre.
The first row of walking mourners behind the bier was reserved for family, which, because Marenna had outlived so many people, was Bassin.
The second row was heads of state. By skullduggery, that included me, instead of the Duck’s boss, who got bumped back to row four.
Behind the dignitaries would march the Palace Household Guard, followed by striped-pants Halberdiers, bands dismounted and mounted, artillery, cavalry, infantry, militia, police and firemen, game wardens, child ballerinas, then the navy. I kind of liked that last part.
As a big wheel, I was full-dressed out like Captain Hook, down to my sword and sash. But in that second row I looked like a Cub Scout.
The Chief of the Council of Headmen of the Hundred Encampments of the Tassini wore a pavement-length, hooded purple cloak that matched the indigo tint of his face and hands.
His sword’s scabbard and belt weren’t encrusted with ordinary jewels, but with Cavorite Stones the size of walnuts. Raw, Stone Hills meteoric Cavorite doesn’t eat gravity, though a Stone is as light as a ping pong ball. A Stone is a translucent, insulating rind that this universe grows around a stray sliver of a universe next door. The sliver isn’t matter, at least not as matter exists in the four dimensions of this universe. Harkening back to Howard Hibble’s visualization of this universe as one sheet of newspaper, Cavorite is a piece of the preceding page that lays up against this page, and they both got balled up together.
Physics aside, even one Stone glows red, so the Tassini Chief looked like a neon beer sign walking.
Yes, even heads of states at war with Marin attended, under truce. The Casuni and the Tassini shared a sovereign with Marin the way Canada and Australia shared a sovereign with England. But less chu
mmy.
“May the Bitch burn in hell for eternity!” Casus, ruler of the Casuni, bent toward me and whispered, so close that I could smell the groundfruit crumbs in his black beard. Casus was nearly as tall, nearly as broad, and half as hairy, as a grizzly.
I whispered back, “We wouldn’t have won the war without her, Casus.”
Casus grinned, and slapped my back so hard that I bounced off the Tassini Headman, who stumbled, then scowled at both of us.
Casus said, “Now, there was a war! When the Emerald River runs with your enemy’s blood, you know it’s going to be a good day!” He wore a gold helmet with a nose guard, and a stiff, red-plumed crest on its centerline. His metal breastplate and órea yogauntlets matched his helmet, and his breeches, cape, and gold-spurred boots were black. His four pistol holsters, two on his belt and two at his pectorals, were empty in deference to the occasion, but he wore a sword as broad as a canoe paddle.
The Queen’s cold, uncasketed body lay atop the bier, elevated on a solid silver catafalque, dressed in a silver tiara, and a gown of feathers, each hammered from silver. Bassin’s mother, who in life might have weighed a hundred pounds after dessert, couldn’t have stood in the dress.
A whip cracked, and the bier inched forward, then began to roll smoothly on the Queen’s final, three-mile journey, “the Miles,” as it was called. For all its gold and silver, the bier’s mass scarcely fazed the team that pulled it.
A strock looks a lot like a Styracosaur, which looks like a size quintuple-x rhino, with a frill of multiple, rear-pointing horns, as though it were wearing one of those indian-chief headdresses. Marini farmers that plow behind strocks file down their nose horn and frill horns, because a bull’s neck muscles are so strong that its horn can punch through an armored wagon.
The six matched pairs of ebony bull strocks that drew the queen’s bier needed all those neck muscles. The face, frill, and curving horns of each bull were masked behind a concave gold helmet, piped in silver, that must have outweighed a brick pallette.
Behind us, the massed bands began a dirge.
As we walked, Casus said to me, “I suppose you’re right about her. I should pull the long face today. But the truth? I’d dance the Miles barefoot.”
Because the Clans cremated their dead, their language had no idiom for dancing on someone’s grave.
Casus had stated the equivalent Casuni idiom. We didn’t all walk directly behind the royal bier. We all walked behind, but fifteen feet to the right of, the bier. A dozen adult strock take in nearly three tons of water and dietary fiber every day. The thrust of the idiom was that you’d have to be really, really happy that someone was dead to walk directly behind their bier barefoot for three miles.
The Duck had bribed the cortège director to diagram me lined up next to Casus, because Casus and I had another of those combat-bonded personal relationships that diplomats love to leverage. Walking three miles with the commander of Marin’s enemy was a SNO, which was a diplomatic idiom, unrelated to poop. A Serendipitous Negotiation Opportunity was one created without investment of negotiating capital. Neither side had to yield about the shape of the negotiating table, or give in by requesting the meeting. The parties, apparently thrown together by circumstance, just talked. Women understood this technique since the first one dropped her handkerchief. It took men four years at Harvard to figure it out.
As we walked, me taking two steps to Casus’ one, I asked, “If the Slug war was good, why is this war bad?”
“We gain nothing from it. We can’t eat the Stones we capture. We can’t sell them to you, because the Marini control the ports.”
“Then why did you start it?”
“The Bitch,” he darted his eyes around, then continued, “—God praise her memory,óise”
“Do you know why?”
“Some lie about fuel surcharge.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. Howard. “Did you talk to her about it?”
“I said when the last war ended that I’d talk to her again if we met in hell. Jason, I have lost sons in this war.”
I patted his forearm, but not too hard. Casus grieved for every son he had lost. But he would have been devastated if any of them chose a low-mortality profession, say, retail, instead of pillaging. And at last count he had sired over six hundred of them.
Along the route, a weeping Marini freewoman in housemaid’s robes broke from the crowd, and hurled a clothes iron at Casus. “That’s for my son! Burn in hell, you ogre!”
The iron bounced off Casus’ breastplate like a pebble, and he stared back over his shoulder as guards wrestled the woman to the pavement.
The rest of the Miles passed uneventfully. Women held infants above their heads, to witness the Queen’s passage. Men wept. The bier’s wheels creaked.
Isolated raindrops plocked the Boulevard’s cobbles as the bier halted at the stair that stretched up the royal pyre.
It took twenty of the Queen’s Household Guard thirty minutes to march the Queen’s silver catafalque up the two hundred steps to the pyre’s apex.
Bassin, bareheaded, in black armor, followed them with a lit, upraised torch. Marini artificial limbs were more torture implements than they were modern organic prosthetics, but after three miles on only one real leg, Bassin betrayed neither a limp nor a twitch of discomfort.
Casus said, “Her son’s as tough as she was. He could almost pass for Casuni.”
“Would you talk to him then?”
“About what?”
“Patching up the alliance. You’ve lost sons. The Marini and the Tassini have lost sons. My world and yours could lose more than that if the Slugs return. So at least talk, that’s all I’m suggesting.”
The pallbearers rested Her Majesty atop the pyre, then retreated, and left Bassin alone above the throng. He raised the torch, and the crowd replied to the gesture, speaking with one voice the last toast made at all Clan funerals, “May paradise spare you from allies!”
Bassin knelt, lit the kindling beneath the catafalque, then returned down the stairway, as the flames spread, and the temperature soared until molten silver coursed down troughs that bordered the stairway alongside him.
The thundering, growing fire seared my cheeks, as Casus shrugged. “In paradise, we need no allies. But apparently I’m going to hell.”
THIRTY-TWO
THAT EVENINö6" G, I cornered the Duck at the wake, an intimate gathering for six thousand, held in the Summer Palace inner court. The skies had cleared, and Bren’s second moon, the red one, sped north to south above us. It was a pretty thing, but I never could understand why Howard spent so much time studying it. It didn’t even affect the tides, the way a proper moon should.
“It was the Spooks’ goddam fuel surcharge!”
“What?”
“That’s what set Casus off.”
The Duck grimaced, and pumped his fist. “Damn! How could we have known?”
“You could have asked him. Duck, all diplomats do is talk to each other.”
“Jason, the Casuni have no diplomats. They have no embassy. Casus lives in a yurt and follows migrating dinosaurs. We would have had to retask an overhead ’Bot just to find him.”
A servant passed us silver mead goblets. I sipped, then said, “Anyway, he’s willing to talk to Bassin.”
The Duck smiled, and tinged his goblet against mine. “I think we can end this war cheap. We reverse the surcharge—”
“That just gets Casus back to where he was. He’s lost sons.”
The Duck raised his palm. “Let me finish. If we strip the weapons systems off one Kodiak, we can make Casus a present of it, without exceeding our authority.”
I bugged my eyes. “A cheap bribe?”
The Duck frowned so hard that his lips made a beak. “A gesture of respect and shared humanity. In 1945, Roosevelt made the King of Saudi Arabia a present of an airliner and Roosevelt’s spare wheelchair. The ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia held into this century. Would the deat
h of even one more parent’s son be cheaper?”
Five weeks later, Howard, Ord, the Duck, and I watched from our Consulate’s roof, as a transport carrying the first Cavorite cargo to leave Bren in months lifted off.
The Duck turned to a holo gen, and keyed up a real-time overhead image with audio, from a TOT operating over the Casuni Highlands. Snow patched the grassland, and a herd of thousands of grazing duckbills drifted across the rolling landscape.
As we watched, duckbills at the herd margin raised their heads, and stared in the direction of distant thunder. They began to trot, then the herd stampeded, a living tsunami that shook the ground.
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