Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future

by Barbara Bartholomew

  By nightfall the three of them were housed in the best Capron had to offer, a recently built wooden shack that did less than their cave prison to keep out the cold wind. And they were served large slabs of roasted meat with root vegetables, and her daughters were hungry enough to eat heartily of everything served, even though they had to use their fingers in place of forks and spoons. As for Claire, a life-long vegetarian, she was content with sampling the vegetables and hoping that none of them came down with any kind of stomach disorder.

  They were settling down onto their makeshift beds on the floor when Adaeze suddenly straightened, the look coming to her face that told her mother she was focusing on a significant communication.

  “He’s just standing out there all by himself, yelling “Claire! Claire!” she said aloud.

  “He who? What are you talking about?”

  “The man you call Jamie,” Adaeze responded in a tone of disgust. “That’s a little boy’s name.”

  Claire sat up. “Jamie’s from Earth. You can’t hear him. He can’t hear you.”

  “I can see him through Aremian eyes. They’re watching him and thinking he’s out of his mind.”

  “You said he was alone.”

  “He thinks he is. But our crew is trying to keep an eye on everybody and everything. They don’t understand what’s going on.”

  Jamie was calling for her. Suddenly Claire felt almost fifteen again. Her first instinct was to instruct her daughter to send words through the cruiser crew that she was okay and no longer a prisoner. But then she had a second thought and reclined again on her sleeping mat. “Get some sleep, Adaeze,” she said. “Your sister’s already in dreamland.”

  It wouldn’t do Jamie any harm to worry a little.

  Jamie had never felt so frustrated in his life. Claire, his Claire who had sacrificed herself in a relationship with the emperor to safeguard the rest of them, was asking to be allowed to come home. And Kevin Hartley and his supporters were saying they would meet in the morning to consider the request.

  What if back when she was fifteen Claire had said, ‘Well, I’ll give it a year or two to think whether I want to marry the emperor and be available as a perpetual blood donor at risk of life and sanity?’ Where would the rest of them have been, continually at risk of capture and enslavement by the Gare. Most certainly in that situation, Kevin Hartley would not be mayor of New London.

  Not that he envied him the position. He detested long meetings and bureaucratic entanglements. No the person who should be leading them was Isaiah, who would listen to Jamie and Mack’s concerns and see the community safe. Well, as safe as it could be under the circumstances.

  The odds were certainly against them. It wasn’t like they had a chance of overrunning Sanctuary and driving the Gare out. The best they could hope was that they could defend themselves.

  But Claire, what about her and her two poor little girls, defenseless in the mess that was the prison planet. No doubt they were already suffering terribly.

  The image of the fair-haired delicate little girl with the ready tongue played through his eyes. Her huge blue eyes gazed pleadingly at him. If it had been up to him, she would never have been sacrificed in the first place. He would have fought for her, but she had chosen Mathiah, the Gare emperor.

  He was hardly aware that he was saying her name out loud as he strode across the lush plain outside New London, but he’d been a warrior too long not to be aware that he was being watched and who was doing the watching.

  Stupid Kevin hadn’t even locked the cruiser crew up, but had been ready to give them open access to the city as honored guests. Jamie figured as long as they were kept busy out here watching him, nobody else was at risk.

  Finally he came to a stop like a mule stubbornly refusing to move one more inch and called gruffly, “You might as well come out and talk. We need to come to an understanding.”

  Quietly, almost soundlessly, the captain and crew from the cruiser came out to stand, tall and threatening, around him.

  “We’ve got to go rescue Claire and the princesses,” Jamie said.

  Even though he knew that the man standing before him was only a more distantly evolved member of his own race, he seemed alien standing there, his large eyes unblinking. Finally he spoke, “I am Thereon,” he said, “captain of the ship Princess Adaeze and member of the imperial guard.”

  “My name’s Jamie Lewis Ward and I hail originally from the state of Oklahoma in the USA on planet Earth.”

  They exchanged nods. “Now can we go get Claire?” he asked. “In fact, why didn’t you bring her with you?”

  “She was imprisoned, as were the princesses. Those who held her hostage told us to go to the emperor and demand ransom. They were unaware that he no longer lived. The empress sent us here.”

  Former empress, the way Jamie saw it. But he wouldn’t argue.

  “She asked for sanctuary,” Captain Thereon went on, “for herself and the princesses Adaeze and Lillianne.”

  “Adaeze? The same as the ship?”

  The captain nodded.

  “Well, as a resident of New London I say we get them and bring them back and we’ll worry about what the mayor of this place says when we step foot back on Sanctuary.”

  “Blood,” the Aremian corrected.

  “Sanctuary,” Jamie argued.

  He thought the captain almost broke into a smile. “We will go for them,” he agreed and led the way toward the ship.

  “By the way, captain,” Jamie said, as the crew followed behind him. “Aren’t you and your people kind of out of line running off with Claire and her girls this way?”

  “No. We are in line with the late emperor’s wishes. The Empress Claire is the rightful regent for the new emperor and we stand by her loyally as is our duty. Traitors are fighting against the imperial guard. “

  Jamie nodded at this summing up of the whole complicated political question. Most likely it wouldn’t matter who was right, but who was the most powerful and he had a feeling it wasn’t Claire and her imperial guard.

  He went on board the little ship with these men and women he didn’t even know, deciding that for certain sure Isaiah would call him a fool.

  But it was almost as though he could hear Claire calling to him across space.

  TEN

  Having sent word to the cruiser crew to come and pick them up, Claire set out to keep her daughters alive in the meantime. Remembering how Karen had maintained power through lieutenants in the early days on Sanctuary, she allied herself with half a dozen of the strongest and most influential individuals encountered and prepared to take over command of the immediate environs.

  All she had going for her was her own dominant personality, the fact that she had been empress, and, most importantly, two far speaking daughters.

  Nobody had publicly challenged Adaeze and Lillianne by claiming that girls couldn’t be speakers. A whistling girl and a crowing hen, she recalled from somewhere in her increasingly dim past on Earth, females that took on supposedly male roles didn’t come to a good end.

  So much for that, she and her girls would prove the old adage wrong. Power was mostly a combination of bluff and tradition, she decided, and on Capron they were mighty short of tradition.

  “They are returning,” Adaeze told her over a breakfast that was almost as revolting as the dinner the night before. Lillianne nibbled at a mouthful that looked like grain straight from the field, than spat it out.

  Claire didn’t bother to scold her for her bad manners. She felt a little like spitting herself, but instead chewed at the grain, knowing she would need the strength it could give her. “If the people here can eat this stuff,” she said, “so can we.”

  Adaeze ate. Lillianne sipped at a heavily sweetened hot drink made from some native plant and frowned her distaste.

  “He is coming with them,” Adaeze said once she’d swallowed her mouthful of grain.

  “My friend?” she asked. “Jamie Ward.”

  Adaeze nodded.
“He is not nearly as handsome as my father,” she said with open disapproval.

  Claire wanted to argue, drawing up an instant picture of the boy in western garments who had befriended her during the journey to Sanctuary and in the few hours that followed before her capture by Mathiah’s guards. He’d even fought to get her back and protested ardently when she’d made the decision to remain with Mathiah and the Aremians to protect the little community of New London.

  Of course he wasn’t seven feet tall with a gleaming hairless head and the ability to communicate across worlds, so to Adaeze he would seem weak and ineffectual. Besides both girls had looked up to their father as the epitome of masculinity. And Mathiah had been a good guy, she had come to love and depend on him, but still there in the back of their relationship had been the fact that he’d given her no choice. He’d traded the good of New London and its people for her relationship with him, a relationship that inevitably left her at risk for pain and even death.

  She was certainly not glad Mathiah was dead. She missed him terribly, but more and more these days she was going back to her real life as a human being from the planet Earth.

  She was not an Aremian and never would be. But where did that leave her girls with their heritage from both worlds?

  That was something they’d have to work out for themselves. Life threw the unexpected at you and you made the best of it. They were her daughters; they would manage.

  “Eat your breakfast, Lillianne,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to do before our ship gets here.”

  Lillianne complied by picking up a tiny amount of the grain and transferring it slowly to her mouth. That was one of the differences between the girls: Adaeze would just say ‘no,’ if she didn’t like what she was being told to do. Outright challenge was her way.

  But Lillianne would make a show of obedience and then weasel her way around it. She’d inherited some of her father’s subtlety.

  “I’m going to sit right here and watch you until you eat a reasonable amount,” Claire told her firmly. “We can’t afford to have you get sick on us.”

  “This food will make me sick,” Lillianne retorted.

  Claire had not stood at her husband’s side while he commanded millions for nothing. One eleven-year-old girl, no matter how talented, was not going to intimidate her. She fixed the fuzzy-haired girl who was already taller than her with her best mother look and, to her secret relief, Lillianne began to eat, though still scowling.

  Adaeze had finished eating, having consumed her food with seemingly little regard for its lack of taste. “What do we do next, Mom? What do you have in mind other than managing to stay alive until your Jamie and the crew gets back here?”

  “Not my Jamie,” Claire denied hastily. “We were no more than friends, just as were Isaiah and Mack. You’ll like all of them, Adaeze, Isaiah is so bright and Mack is an engineer, or at least his father was, and he is resourceful in any situation.”

  “Didn’t you have any friends who were girls, Mom?” Adaeze asked pointedly.

  Claire wasn’t surprised that her daughter was jealous for her late father’s sake, but Adaeze would just have to learn that her mother would have to go on and lead her life without Mathiah. Not that she didn’t mourn him, they had been the closest of companions these past years and even when he was dying, he’d done his best to spare her. It was his mother who had insisted she be submitted to torture in what was so obviously a futile attempt to save Mathiah.

  She didn’t blame him for that and she was grateful for all the years of protection he’d given New London, but now she and the New Londoners would have to find ways to keep themselves safe.

  As for Jamie, she had no idea what he would be like now. She’d been attracted to him in the first place because he had been so self-confident, a strong male figure, when everybody else was running around in a kind of panic. He’d been a natural leader, who listened to the counsel of those he trusted, and then made his own decisions and acted on them.

  She supposed she’d been attracted by the way he looked, a tall, lean fifteen-year-old in boots and jeans with a southwestern drawl. Even at that young age, he’d been his own man. She’d appreciated that and had found some security in an uncertain world in his company.

  No telling what he would be like now.

  “What are your plans?” Adaeze asked insistently.

  “Yeah, Mom?” Lillianne’s insistent tone and choice of words sounded more like Earth than Aremia, Claire thought, grinning in spite of herself.

  “Serve you right if you get hungry,” she told her younger daughter, getting to her feet. “First thing we’re going to do is a little raid. We’re going to get our valuables back. We may need those jewels.”

  The Capronians had, of course, stripped them of their personal property within the first minutes after taking them captive. Claire didn’t feel that she could just let a fortune in jewels go. Her daughters in their hopefully long future ahead deserved to have at least that much left of the heritage their father had given them.

  “Are you out of your mind, Mom? We don’t have even a knife or gun and certainly not any modern weapons. How can we get the jewels back?”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Lillianne,” Claire said, frowning at her daughter. She saw Adaeze straighten to her full height, which was already about three inches taller than her mother.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Claire looked with amazement at the older girl. Adaeze was the rational, cautious one of the two and she was urging action.

  “Mom, I hear them talking and I know who has the jewels and where they are hidden. All we have to do is take them back.”

  “I thought most of them weren’t speakers.”

  “Most,”’ Adaeze sounded only slightly smug. “But not all. Let’s do it.”

  It wasn’t quite that easy, of course.

  Adaeze led them through small clusters of chatting conspirators, some of whom looked at them with bitterness not unmixed with awe. The three of them, while observing everything and everyone, pretended to be totally self-absorbed and completely fearless.

  These people were dirty and they smelled bad, but this second look allowed Claire to feel a certain sympathy for them. They had been rejected by their own kind, cast off onto this abysmal planet with its cold winds and sparse vegetation. They stared now with open envy at the three obviously privileged individuals.

  If she hadn’t been so terrified, Claire would have felt sorry for them. She knew that most of them, the ones who were truly guilty of the crimes for which they’d been transported, probably deserved this punishment. It was, maybe, a slightly better fate than the certain death that would have been their destiny back on their home world.

  She remembered reading that criminals had been sent from Europe to the new world of the Americas or to Australia back in the old days. It had been a harsh life, but in the long run, they’d built new lives and had the last laugh.

  She wished the same for these unpleasant people, but before that could happen they would have to learn to work together.

  She would have stopped to give a talk on the subject, but only hesitated as Adaeze turned to glare fiercely at her. Not perhaps the best time for a Patrick Henry rabble raising speech, especially not considering that many of these people from distant worlds most likely wouldn’t understand her version of Aremian speech anyway.

  Maybe this wasn’t the time for the ‘liberty or death’ talk. She became more convinced of that as one after another, people, mostly men, fell into place behind them until a small army of perhaps two dozen followed.

  She glanced at Adaeze, walking to her right, and was rewarded with a brief nod. This was by intent, her daughter was drawing supporters.

  She followed the older girl’s direction until they stopped before a make-shift building, even smaller and shabbier than the one where they currently resided.

  Adaeze didn’t hesitate, but pushed open a door and stepped inside. Claire scampered to follow her, anxious to stan
d between the girl and danger.

  Four very grubby looking men sat around a wooden table, playing some sort of game with small stones. The glistening jewels given to her by her late husband lay in piles between them.

  They were gambling for possession of her property! Claire darted past Adaeze to reach for a particularly lovely ruby medallion that Mathiah had given her on their most recent anniversary.

  She grabbed it and held it tight against her chest. “How dare you?” she sputtered angrily.

  The closest man jumped up and seized hold of the arm holding the valuable ornament. His grip squeezed her arm painfully.

  He stared at her with eyes that seemed lost in deep evil and for just an instant she actually felt afraid. Maybe she’d acted a little prematurely in seizing the medallion.

  But then she saw that his gaze had slid past her to regard Adaeze. Aha! This had to be one of the telepaths her daughter had been tracking. All unknowing, he had led them here.

  In spite of the stoicism of her daughter’s features, her mother could still read much from her expression. Adaeze was communicating in strong terms just what could happen to bandits who stole from the empress.

  The man’s lined face showed defiance, quickly melted away by fear. Claire just hoped Adaeze didn’t push hard enough to put them all in danger. These guys might just decide that their only safely lay in obliterating the three of them.

  Barely aware of the other three men at the table or even of their supporters now crowding into the small room, she watched the silent test of wills between the girl and the hardened barbarian.

  ELEVEN

  Jamie Ward had never felt so lost in his life, not even when he was fifteen years old and torn away from the little farm in Oklahoma where he lived with his grandparents and sister.

  Then he’d been accompanied by others like him, teen boys and girls from across the country, each one feeling as lonely and disoriented as he did. Now he was the only one among a crew of silent aliens who only spoke aloud when they talked to him.