by Iain Banks
'Gumpo,' Langtuhn said with a big smile. I had the worrying feeling that this was the sixth Marx Brother, but it turned out to mean 'You're welcome'.
We cleared the city; the road stopped twisting wildly at random and started twisting wildly at regular intervals, zigzagging steeply up the boulder-littered side of the mountain. Dotted along the roadside amongst the houses were more tall masts, prayer flags, squat stone bell-shaped stupas and thin wooden prayer windmills, their sails painted with dense passages of holy script. The houses themselves were sporadically spaced, turf-roofed and, from a distance, easily mistaken for piles of stones. People walking downhill under dripping, small but heavy-looking packs, or trudging uphill under huge and heavy-looking bundles of wood or dung, stopped and waved at us. I waved back cheerfully.
'Do you yet know how long you will be staying with us, Ms Telman?' Langtuhn shouted back.
'I'm still not sure. Probably just a few days.'
'Only a few days?'
'Yes.'
'Oh dear! But then you might not meet the Prince.'
'Really? Oh, what a shame. Why? When is he due back?'
'Not for a week or thereabouts, I am told.'
'Oh, well, not to worry, eh?'
'He will be most disappointed, I'm sure.'
'Really.'
'You cannot stay any longer?'
'I doubt it.'
'That is a shame. I suspect he cannot come home any earlier. He has been away on business, looking after all our interests.'
'Has he, now?'
'Yes. I understand he has said that soon we may all start to benefit from greater outside investment. That will be good, will it not?'
'I dare say.'
'Though of course, he is in Paris, or some such French place. We must hope he does not gamble it all away!'
'Is the Prince a gambler?' I asked. I'd watched him at the blackjack table in Blysecrag; if he was a gambler he wasn't a very good one.
'Oh, no,' Langtuhn said, and took both hands off the steering wheel to wave them as he looked back at me. 'I was making a joke. Our Prince enjoys himself, but he is most responsible.'
'Yes. Good.'
I sat back in my seat. Well, not a despot, then.
The road grew tired with making wild zigzags up an increasingly steep slope and struck out ambitiously along a notch cut in a vertical cliff. A hundred metres below, the river lay frozen in the bottom of the gorge like a giant icicle fallen and shattered amongst the sharp black rocks.
Langtuhn didn't seem to have noticed the transition from a steep-but-ordinary road to a slot-in-a-cliff. He kept trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. 'We have been hoping that one day the Prince would come back from Paris with a lady who might become his new wife,' he told me.
'No luck yet?' I looked away, hoping this might encourage him to return his attention to the business of keeping the car on the narrow road. The view down into the chasm was not an encouraging one.
'None whatsoever. There was a princess from Bhutan he seemed most sweet upon a few years ago, they say, but she married a tax-consulting gentleman from Los Angeles, USA.'
'Smart girl.'
'Oh, I do not think so. She could have been a queen.'
'Hmm.' I rubbed the red tip of my nose with one gloved hand. and looked in my guidebook for the word for frostbite.
The old palace canted out over a deep, ice-choked gorge a mile down from the glacier foot, its haphazard jumble of off-white, black-windowed buildings supported from beneath by a half-dozen enormous charcoal-dark timbers, each the size of a giant redwood. Together they splayed out from a single jagged spur of rock far below, so that the whole ramshackle edifice looked like a pile of ivory dice clutched in a gigantic ebony hand.
This was where the dowager Queen lived, the Prince's mother. Even higher up the mountainside, at the head of tumultuously zigzag paths, monasteries lay straggled across the precipitous slopes in long, encrusted lines of brightly painted buildings. We passed a few groups of saffron-robed monks on the road; they stopped and looked at the car. Some bowed, and I bowed back.
Langtuhn parked the car in a dusty courtyard; a couple of small Thulahnese ladies-in-waiting in dramatic carmine robes met us at the doors and led us into the dark spaces of the palace, through clouds of incense, to the old throne room.
'You will remember to address the Queen as ma'am, or Your Royal Highness, won't you?' Langtuhn whispered to me, as we approached.
'Don't worry.'
Guarding the doors was a massively rotund Chinese man, who wore camouflaged black/grey/white army fatigues and a jacket made of what looked like yak fur. He was sitting in a chair reading a manga comic when we approached. He looked up and rose carefully, taking a pair of minuscule glasses off his nose and leaving the comic open on his seat.
'This is Mihu,' Langtuhn whispered to me, 'the Queen's manservant. Chinese. Very devoted.'
Mihu moved in front of the double doors, barring the way to the Queen's chamber. The two ladies-in-waiting bowed and spoke to him in slower-than-normal Thulahnese while gesturing at me. He nodded and opened the doors.
Langtuhn had to stay in the antechamber with the two ladies. Mihu came into the room with me and stood with his back to the door. I looked around.
I hadn't really believed that the dowager Queen had stayed in bed for the last two and a half decades, since the death of her husband but, then, I hadn't seen the bed.
The ceiling of the huge state room was painted like the night sky. Its two longer walls were lined by bizarrely proportioned sculptures of snarling warriors, two storeys tall. These were covered in gold leaf, which had started to peel so that the soot-black wood underneath showed through like dense sable skin under flimsy gold armour. Tissue-light, the strips and tatters of glittering leaf waved in the faint draughts that swirled through the vast room, setting up a strange, half-heard rustling, as though hidden legions of mice were all crumpling Lilliputian sweet-wrappers at once. Snow-white daylight spilled in from the wall of windows, which looked across a terrace to the valley; its glare glittered back from the rustling scraps of gold like ten thousand cold and tiny flames spread out across the walls.
The bed sat in the centre; a painted wooden construction for which the term four-poster was entirely inadequate. I had seen houses smaller than this. It took three tall steps just to get level with the base. From there more steps led up through lush velvet drapes and heavy brocade hangings to the surface of the bed, while from the cantilevered canopy a network of dyed ropes and loops of printed silk hung like a profusion of jungle creepers. Big bed, big bedspread: a vast embroidered purple cover stretched from each corner and edge of the bed, rising like a perfect Mount Fuji of lilac to its central summit, where the Queen Mother's head — pale and surrounded by ringlets of white hair — stuck out of a hole in the middle like a snowy summit. From the angle of her head it was hard to tell whether she was lying, sitting or standing. I imagined it was perfectly possible to do all three in there.
According to Langtuhn the Queen Mother didn't even have to stay inside if she didn't want to, The whole bed was mounted on trolley wheels running on rails leading to the tall, wide set of double doors set in the west-facing wall of windows, beyond which lay the wide balcony with the view over the valley below. Trundling the whole apparatus out to the sunlight would be a task for Mihu, I imagined. With the bed out there and the bed's canopy rolled back, the old lady could get a breath of fresh air and take the sun.
There was nowhere to sit, so I stood facing the foot of the bed.
The little snowball head, about a metre higher than me in the centre of the bed, spoke. 'Miss Telman?' Her voice was thin but still strong. The Queen Mother spoke excellent English, because she was. She had been the Honourable Lady Audrey Illsey until she'd married the late King in 1949.
'Ms, yes, ma'am.'
'What?'
'I prefer the title Ms rather than Miss, Your Highness.'
'Are you married?'
'No, m
a—'
'Then you are a Miss, I think.'
'Well,' I said, wishing now that for once I had shut the hell up about the Ms/Miss thing, 'there's been a change in the way people relate to each other, Your Highness. In my generation, some of us decided to take the title Ms, as a direct equivalent of Mr, to —'
'I don't need lessons in recent history, young woman! I'm not stupid, or senile. I have heard of feminism, you know.'
'Oh. Have you? I thought perhaps…'
There was a commotion in one side of the slope of the mauve hillside of bedcover, just down from where the dowager Queen's right shoulder must be, as though a volcanic side-vent was about to erupt. After some flapping and muttering, a small white hand appeared from an embroidered slit in the cover clutching a rolled-up magazine. A thin arm clad in lacy white waved hand and magazine. 'I can read, Miss Telman,' she told me. 'The post may take a while but subscriptions do arrive eventually. I am rarely more than a month behind the times.' Another thin white arm appeared from the bedclothes; she opened the magazine out. 'There you are; last month's Country Life. I don't suppose you take it, do you? You sound rather American.'
'I have met one or two US citizens who subscribe to the magazine, ma'am, however I am not one of them.'
'So you are American?'
'I'm British — Scottish — by birth. I have dual British-US nationality.'
'I see. Well, I don't see, really. I don't see how one can be of dual nationality, apart from purely legally.' Both arms and the magazine disappeared under the covers again. 'I mean to say, who are you loyal to?'
'Loyal to, Your Highness?'
'Yes. Are you loyal to the Queen, or to…the American flag? Or are you one of these absurd Scottish Nationalists?'
'I'm more of an internationalist, ma'am.'
'And what's that supposed to mean?'
'It means my loyalties are contingent, Your Highness.'
'Contingent?' She blinked rapidly, looking confused. 'Upon what?'
'Behaviour, ma'am. I have always thought that believing in one's country right or wrong was, at best, sadly misguided.'
'Oh, you have, have you? I must say you are a very opinionated young woman.'
'Thank you, ma'am.'
I watched her eyes narrow. One arm reappeared with a pair of glasses, through which she surveyed me. 'Come closer,' she said. Then added, 'If you please.'
I stepped up to the base of the giant bed. There was a strong smell of incense and mothballs. The fluttering scraps of gold leaf on the walls set up a distracting shimmer on either side.
The Queen brought out a white handkerchief and polished her glasses with it. 'You have met my son.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'What do you think of him?'
'I think he is a credit to you, Your Highness. He is charming and…responsible.'
'Responsible? Ha! Either you know nothing or you're one of the useless ones. One of the lying ones. The ones who say what they think I want to hear.'
'Perhaps you're confusing lying with politeness, ma'am.'
'What?'
'Well, I don't really know your son all that well, Your Highness. As far as I can tell he seems a gentleman. Well-bred, polite…Oh, and a very good dancer, great poise and extremely light on his feet.' (The Queen's brows furrowed at this, so I didn't continue with the topic.) 'Ah, he seems sad, sometimes, and he is a little flirtatious, perhaps, but not rudely or aggressively so.' I thought back to what Langtuhn had said in the car. 'He doesn't seem to be too extravagant, which is always a good thing in a prince, I think, especially when they are away from home. Ah,' I said, struggling to end on a positive note, and failing, 'I suspect the responsibilities of his inheritance lie heavily on him.'
The old Queen shook her head as though to dismiss all this. 'When is he going to get married? That's what I want to know.'
'I'm afraid I can't help you there, ma'am.'
'Not many can, young lady. Do you have any idea how few princesses there are in the world these days? Or even duchesses? Or ladies?'
'I have no idea, ma'am.'
'Of course you wouldn't. You're just a commoner. You are just a commoner, aren't you?'
'I have to confess that any position I've achieved has been attained through merit and hard work, ma'am, so, yes, I'm afraid so.'
'Don't flaunt your inverted snobbery at me, young woman!'
'I'm not usually given to flaunting, ma'am. Perhaps it's the altitude.'
'And don't be downright cheeky either!'
'I can't imagine what's come over me, ma'am.'
'You are a very disrespectful and impertinent girl.'
'I did not mean to be disrespectful, Your Highness.'
'Is it so terrible for a mother to worry about her son?'
'Not at all, ma'am.'
'It would be terrible not to, I think.'
'It would indeed.'
'Hmm. Do you think he's marriageable material?'
'Well, of course, Your Highness. I'm sure he will make some lucky princess, or lady, a wonderful husband.'
'Platitudes, Miss Telman. That is the sort of thing my courtiers tell me.'
I wondered if Mihu and the two little red-clad ladies counted as her courtiers. The palace had seemed quite empty apart from them. I cleared my throat and said, 'He is your son, ma'am. Even if I thought he'd make an absolutely awful husband I'd be unlikely to say so right out without at least softening the blow a little.'
The Queen Mother sounded exasperated. 'Then just tell me what you feel! ,
'He'll probably be fine, ma'am. If he marries the right person. Isn't that all one can say of anybody?'
'He is not just anybody!'
'Any mother would say the same, ma'am.'
'Yes, and it would be sentimentality! Motherly instinct or whatever you want to call it! Suvinder is heir to a throne.'
'Your Highness, I'm not sure how much help I can really be to you in this. I'm not married, I don't expect to marry, and so I don't tend to think in those terms, plus I don't know your son or the international royal-matrimony circuit well enough to comment.'
'Hmm.' The Queen put her glasses away again. 'Why are you here, Miss Telman?'
'I thought I had been summoned, Your Highness.'
'I meant here in Thulahn, you idiot!' Then she sighed and her eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. 'I beg your pardon, Miss Telman. I should not have called you an idiot. Do forgive me.'
'Of course, ma'am. I am here in Thulahn to decide whether I ought to accept a post which will mean coming here to live.'
'Yes, you are one of these mysterious business people my son talks about in such admiring tones. Who are you really? Are you the Mafia?'
I smiled. 'No, ma'am. We are a commercial concern, not a criminal one.'
'My son says that you want to invest what sound to me like most unlikely amounts of money in our country. What's in it for you?'
'We'd like to use Thulahn as a sort of base, Your Highness,' I said, trying to choose my words with care. 'We'd hope that we might be welcomed by your people and that some of us might become citizens. There would be more trade and more dealings in general with other countries, thanks to the improvements and investments we'd like to offer, and so we hope, and we think, it would be appropriate that some us might be allowed certain diplomatic posts so that we could represent Thulahn abroad.'
'You're not backed by those bloody Chinese, are you?'
I wondered if Mihu, still standing by the door, understood English. 'No, ma'am. We're not backed by anybody, in the way I think you mean.' If anything, I thought, we were the ones who tended to do the backing.
'Hmm. Well, it all sounds jolly fishy to me.'
'We mean only to help Thulahn, Your Highness. The improvements to the infrastructure and so on would be offered, not —'
'Family, faith, farms and fealty,' the dowager Queen said, releasing one arm to wag a finger at me.
'I beg your pardon, ma'am?'
'You heard. That's what matter
s to these people. Those four things. Nothing else. Everything else is irrelevant.'
'Well, perhaps better water supplies, a few more primary schools, more primary health care, too, and —'
'They have water. No one dies of thirst. They have all the education they need. Do you need a degree to walk behind a plough? No. And health? It will always be hard to live here. It's no place for the weak. We all have to die, young woman. Better to work hard, accept the consolation of one's faith and then go quickly. All this hanging around's just vulgar. People are so greedy these days. Accept your lot and don't insist on extending the misery of those who'd be better off dead. There. That's what I believe. Oh, and you needn't try to hide your feelings. I know what you're thinking. Well, for your information, I have not seen a doctor since I took to my bed, and I will not in the future, no matter what. I've been waiting to die for a quarter of a century, Miss Telman. I believe the good Lord is keeping me alive for his own good reasons and so I shan't hasten the process of dying, but I shan't do anything to delay it, either, once it begins.'
I nodded. 'That's very stoic of you, ma'am. I hope anybody would respect your choice.'
'Yes?' she said slowly, suspiciously. 'But?'
'I…think it would only be right to offer the Thulahnese people a choice as well.'
'A choice of what? Will they want television? Burger bars? Jobs in factories and supermarkets? Salaries in offices? Motor cars? They will doubtless choose all that, if they're offered it. And before you know it we will be just the same as everywhere else and we'll have homosexuals, AIDS, socialists, drug-dealers, prostitutes and muggers. That will be progress, won't it, Miss Telman?'
By now even I was beginning to suspect that there was no point in continuing this argument. I said, 'I'm sorry you feel that way, Your Highness.'
'Are you? Are you really? Try telling the truth.'
'I am. Truly.'
The Queen looked down at me for a while. Then she nodded. She leaned fractionally towards me. 'It is a hateful thing to grow old, Miss Telman. It is not an enjoyable process, and it will come to you one day. I don't doubt you think me an appalling old reactionary, but there is this consolation for me that there may not be for you: I will be glad to leave this stupid, hurtful, degrading world.' She straightened again. 'Thank you for coming to see me. I am tired now. Goodbye. Mihu?'
