Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  I do not ask you

  Because I have no need to. I know exactly why the CAP depot had enough weapons for a sortie, enough to puncture, blast, and otherwise injure the brave and fierce bodies of our Amazonian soldiers. I also know why only twenty-one soldiers guarded the depot and not the normal complement of fifty-five. I know why the Chartered Accountants moved half of their weapons (because, of course, yes, there were originally more) and more than half of their men only the day before the attack (and for accuracy, since these matters are important for posterity, both for ourselves and for its own sake, all of the CAP soldiers that day were indeed men, whilst all of ours were women; it is not often the stereotypes hold true, but they did that day, making at least an interesting or if not interesting then clarifying footnote in history’s own account books). I know, in other words, why the CAP left just enough men to let the depot look protected, though not as many as might have been there, and I know why they left enough arms to make it look fully stocked and ready for war, though again not as many as might have been.

  I know because I told them to do this.

  The war escalates, as wars will

  Most of the early fighting took place in the jungles of Hertfordshire, where our army, that is the Amazonian army (I suppose I don’t know for sure who your army might be), was clearly at an advantage. It was swamp fighting of the stickiest, sinkingest, most mosquito-filled type. All brute force, ambushes, and slaughter at no further away than the length of your arm. We naturally excelled and in no time at all the Chartered Accountants were routed, making, if I may say so, a brave last stand in St Albans before it too finally fell to a sky filled with the rapidly finishing arcs of spears and arrows.

  The plan, self-evident in its simplicity, was to take the surrounding counties first, leaving the CAP trapped inside the M25. Berkshire, et al would be as easy as Herts for our army. The CAP had never really gotten the hang of jungle-battling and had only received the outlying counties as concession for the Port at Dover (and thereby releasing putative control of the Eurostar tunnel to us) in the Non-Hostilities Pact of 1985. What to do after driving them into Central London was a tougher question. Urban fighting was well within our considerable war talents - had we not taken Manchester and Glasgow from the Vikings? - but the Chartered Accountants lived and breathed urban life, literally. We were good at urban warfare; they were great. So for now, we buckled down, surrounding London, which is no small feat, but then again as the horrendously aged war slogan goes (for we have had many, many, many wars), ‘Amazons are not known for their small feet!’ Are you laughing?

  HRH wisely scheduled entertainment for the troops, including television comediennes, an Irish rap group, and concert performances of musicals featuring the original casts from Hove’s West End. As I understand it, there was a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in Watford that went down a treat.

  The missionary work of the ASBCofCinG on the Isle of Man continues, its consequences

  So, KeithAnne, who loomed better than anyone I have ever met, other Amazons included, loomed as in towered, as in much bigger than, not as in weaving, although I suspect she probably could have done that as well, we Amazons being nothing if not multi-skilled. KeithAnne, our first Amazonian Baptist, the first anywhere as far as anyone knew and so far last, including yours naturalised truly.

  Because there were objections you see. Less objections than anger. Less anger even than outrage, not to put too fine a point on it, and retribution, brutal and swift. Missionaries were barely tolerated under international law but what wasn’t tolerated was any degree of success whatsoever. The Amazonian government, then under a teenage HRH who therefore may or may not hold responsibility in any but a titular way, could not of course sanction what happened to my parents, but once KeithAnne, in true zealous convert fashion, for there is no better or at least more eager preacher on earth than the recently born again, began to proselytize to all her co-Amazons, some violent rejoinder was unavoidable.

  My poor parents heard nary a mumble of discontent in Jurby East before a window was quietly broken one night and both their throats slit by the hunting knife of an Amazon, who then spared my own life. Why? Only she knows. KeithAnne, besides immediately adopting me, ignoring the pleas of my own government and church, bless her, complained vociferously all the way through the courts, on through the House of Ladies to HRH herself. HRH, while not publicly denouncing the crime, made an offer to welcome me, after a state-funded education and upbringing, into the Amazon race when I reached my adulthood, bless her as well.

  So my life changed abruptly. I had a new Amazon mother, new Amazon friends who with disappointing predictability called me ‘Shorty’ but who also loved me, and a new Amazon outlook on life, one which I grew to embrace passionately. I embrace it even to this day, even after KeithAnne, with typical loving frankness, detailed for me the exact societal circumstances and implications of my parents’ deaths, though I can’t say I hadn’t guessed what had happened but what do you do when handed that news at eleven? As eleven-year-olds in general and eleven-year-old girls in particular are wells of unfocussed anger anyway, I suppose I did the human thing and split it off from myself, built it its own cabinet and locked it away. An unseen fire still gives off heat though, so as much of a love as I have for my race, I still managed to cock one ear when a female CAP operative, having thoroughly researched my history, made a lengthy and subtle offer about information-gathering for the enemy government.

  I am a proud Amazon. And I am also a spy against them. You should ask me how that is possible.

  The straw that broke the camel’s back of Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones

  Of course Amazons have been impressing Chartered Accountants since time immemorial, but for the last hundred years at least, it has been less concubinage than out-and-out relationships which is understandable if perhaps slightly dull. Times change. People modernise. One realises that bludgeoning a man into submission may not perhaps always get you the perfect husband. The Scottish Amazonian Parliament, now that they’ve realised they can pass a law or two and no one will care or in fact notice, have even formalised an agreement with the Viking governments of Norway and Sweden allowing border perforation for ceremonial Amazon impressments into Scandinavia with reciprocal ceremonial Viking pillagings in the Highlands. Tradition lives on and no one gets hurt. Besides, you have to find a spouse somehow.

  Tippi Ponce-Jones, though, was landed gentry, set in due course to become no less than the eleventh Duchess of Shrewsbury, and in those sorts of households the unspoken rules are a bit different. If it had been one of Tippi’s younger sisters, Reggie, say, then the current Duchess, a frightful old piece of stonework named Cosima, might not have cared as much, but as Tippi was future upper crust there were certain procedures to be followed, certain familial pieties to be upheld. Julian Buxton fit nowhere in this.

  I have known Cosima Ponce-Jones for twenty years but have disliked her for much longer. She used to be Shadow Culture Secretary in the House of Ladies, a minor post, but no one apparently told Cosima. She was the bane of anything that fell remotely outside of traditional Amazon blood art or wood carving, blasting in her aristocratic gasbag way to the rightwing tabloids about ‘Amazonian values’, as if 3,000 years of fierceness and pride were endangered by giant plastic children or an ibex in formaldehyde. She was forced to resign after disrupting an extremely popular Noh Theatre Festival in Leicester by garrotting the visiting French director, a matter of finally picking the wrong target.

  Tippi, miraculously, was, is, a delightful girl. Bright, smart, pretty in a fierce yet bookish sort of way, managing to excel at one of those debutante jobs that are not supposed to involve anything other than smiling and a day or two of filing once a month to make the deb feel like one of the ‘people,’ whoever they are. She met Accountant Buxton at a diplomatic soiree organised in a sweet irony by her own mother. Let us not mistake the hosting of the party as any indication whatsoever of Cosima Ponce-Jones’ politics; she loathed anyt
hing foreign in the way that only minor royalty can. Remember though that she was trying to get back in the of course invited HRH’s good graces with a view to returning to the House of Ladies by Royal Appointment. As this was the only reason she forced herself to smile widely and think of Amazonia at the blank, pasty faces of the Chartered Accountants who had invaded her home, imagine her horror upon seeing young Tippi sharing a laugh downwards to/with one Mr Buxton, she with nostrils flaring, he with a finger shyly tripping the edge of his wine glass.

  Cosima split them up as quickly as diplomacy allowed, sending Tippi on her way bedroomwards and introducing Buxton to the Ladies Brockenwell, the two oldest and most boring twins in the entire UQ. An undaunted Tippi continued inquiries on and then to Mr Buxton through - despite her better judgment - your narrator who is a good friend to have if your mother is unpopular and you want to date a foreigner. Cosima eventually found out, though not about the complicity of yours truly, when happening upon a love letter, of all the romantic, old-fashioned and more to the point completely un-Amazonian things, at least to the Amazons of Cosima’s generation.

  Family severance was threatened, trust funds were placed into caretakers’ hands, Reggie was given Tippi’s eldest-sister room. The straw that broke the particular camel’s back for Tippi was when Cosima miscalculated again - the woman would be genuinely evil if she weren’t so untalented - and mailed an answering letter in Tippi’s name to Mr Buxton, ending the relationship and doing her level best to wound him so badly that he wouldn’t open further letters or accept future contact.

  Why would she think that would work? I’m asking because I genuinely do not know. Sometimes my adopted race is a mystery to me, even after these many years.

  Tippi in short order got herself the flat in Slough and made her daring solo raid on the Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull annual summer picnic and rounders game. The clubbing with the birthing board wasn’t strictly necessary, but by this point, Tippi was caught up in the drama of the thing. Bless her in her ignorance. She couldn’t have known the consequences of her actions.

  The stupid, naïve, selfish, little cow.

  My title incorporates duplicity within itself

  HRH often says that the CAP is ‘nothing more than a consulate grown malignant’ which as with such pronouncements of every world leader in the history of humankind leaves out much more than half the story. To recap: When war broke out in the Belgian Stock Exchange, weak Amazon Queen Jessica XII allowed the democratically elected government, fleeing from certain execution, to take up residence in their London embassy. After the Venture Capitalists won the day in Brussels, Queen Jessica gave up a substantial plot of land to the now-exiled now-former democratically elected government. The CAP was formed and somehow, incredibly, though it probably has most to do with not having to cross either the Channel or the North Sea for impressments, it remained. Various Queens up to and including our own beloved long may she reign HRH have skirmished with it, with varying degrees of success and withdrawal, but all at most with halfheartedness. We don’t want the CAP to go anywhere. We like them there. But we also like them to know that we’re all around here and that they shouldn’t forget it.

  It works for everyone.

  Except for me. And HRH. But to my eternal regret for different reasons.

  My title of Domestic Affairs Advisor incorporates duplicity within itself. The CAP would in the eyes of the world fall under the brief of Dame Geraldine Wiggins, Foreign Affairs Advisor. In the real and far more complicated world in which we are all forced to live, HRH regards the CAP as part of the Amazon, waiting to be reincorporated, and therefore under the purview of the Domestic Affairs Advisor, but secretly so, so that no one would know our intentions.

  Which is where I came in.

  As promised, HRH kept an eye over my schooling and upbringing. I was given a junior post in government, again appointed rather than elected, and kept in close consultation with HRH. She took a sisterly liking to me as far as she was able (see above for the friendship incapability of monarchs), but there were specific reasons, too. I was an Amazon, but I was not. I was a Manxwoman, but I was not. I was an American, but I was not. Domestic Affairs Advisor, as HRH envisioned it, demanded duplicity, demanded understanding of overt intentions which cloaked covert ones, demanded overall a talent for duality. So, Sally Rae Wentworth at your service. What HRH was not to know was that I was better at my job than she would have wanted or guessed.

  Because and yes the war continued, but what the world couldn’t know was that HRH was playing this one for keeps. The time had come, now that the Non-Hostilities Pact 1985, negotiated by the CAP Mayor and a high-level Amazonian known only as S (guess), had been called off on the convenient pretext of Tippi Ponce-Jones. The Home Counties taken in a breeze, we commenced border attacks on the M25.

  ‘Yet somehow they always seem to be ready for us,’ says HRH, creasing her regal brow. ‘Somehow.’

  They have asked for an assassination

  They have asked for an assassination, which I have of course refused and which only proves how deeply I am misunderstood by both sides. They think my motivation (for what?) is revenge upon the Amazons, which it is but also isn’t. I am torn, have always been torn. My eleven-year-old’s rage demands a victim, demands a head on a platter as payment for the dance. And yet Amazon blood, which does not in fact run through my veins, nevertheless runs through my veins. Am I am who I am, or am I am who I have chosen or rejected, even if I didn’t really choose or reject? Because at what point does a person become a people? Did Amazons kill my parents or did an Amazon kill my parents?

  The violent deaths of my mother and father did leave their mark, but only in my aversion to violence, an aversion which was built upon the gospel my parents lived and breathed, which KeithAnne, even during the brevity of her exposure to them, embraced and passed along to me.

  An aversion to violence. In an Amazon. It would be funny.

  I am minimising casualties to as much of an extent as I can by keeping the CAP abreast of our plans, but I am taking lives by prolonging this war, which is not my intention. I could give them enough information to end it, but the cost could very well be too great for the Amazon nation, which is also not my intention. I do not mourn or pick over my betrayal because the very savagery of my own soldiers that I see in day-to-day operations convinces me that my actions are right, and yet I do mourn and pick over my betrayal because that savagery is the vibrant lifeblood of the world that has raised me, has made me as much as possible one of their own. I am an Amazon, and I am not. I am both, and I am neither.

  Surely, I am that most worthless of idealists, stuck on the fence, paralysed and useless, unable to act or able to act only in ways that are opposite to what I believe. How do you get here if all the work you do is to not get here?

  And then despite the best efforts of your narrator

  We made a great stride forward. Moving up from Wimbledon and down from Harrow, we swiftly beat the CAP army back through the West End and, despite heavy fighting in the City, on out into the East End. The CAP government is now holed up in Hackney, its demise inevitable and imminent. Over 16,000 CAP troops died, along with over 31,000 Amazons, the greater skill at urban warfare giving CAP the greater impact if not the victory. The Great Feast is now crowded and boisterous well beyond belief.

  HRH smiled cryptically at me today. I wonder if I was able to hide my surprise at our stride forward quickly enough.

  I have been summoned

  I walk through the Palace, holding my head up, feeling a deep calm that exists only because fear by this time has become pointless. I have failed, though failure implies a cohesive aim, which I do not have and never had. I have dissembled. I have been unable to reconcile. Despite and because of my best efforts, people have died, the war has continued, is almost won. A people whom I love and hate, persons whom I only love. Perhaps there really is no end to this division. So the CAP are nearly conquered, but will HRH discover that I have been right for the
wrong reasons? Who are the Amazons without an enemy? How can you take away war from those you love when taking away war would cause them to cease being the person that you love? I have reached forty-seven, and the waters remain muddied.

  I will not reach forty-eight, it seems.

  The room is warm as I enter, and unguarded. Why should they need guards when they are Amazons, and I am not? The elected Cabinet sit in a half-circle with HRH at the centre. They all look at me, stern, though they are always stern. I ignore them and study only the face of HRH. Is disappointment there? Is anger? My thirty years of friendship cannot overcome her lifetime of Royal training. I am unable to read her gaze.

  She waits for a moment, and then she speaks.

  ‘Sally Rae?’ she says and, yes, it is definitely a question.

  the Seventh International Military War Games

  Dance Committee Quadrennial Competition

  and Jamboree

  Gone to Blazes?

  Caught in a miasma of accusations of cheating, ‘excessive’ casualties, and an increasing championing of athleticism over artistry, the International Military War Games Dance Committee Quadrennial Competition and Jamboree finds itself suffering an identity crisis on the eve of Opening Ceremonies in Ottawa. Sharon Huckabee reports

  Irena Sultanova of Ukraine lines up for another quadruple Salchow, a move unheard of in this event until American Stephanie Butts-Liberty completed the first successful one eight years ago at the Fifth Competition in Gdansk, earning herself the Ice Dancing and Shooting gold in the process. Six of the seven top contenders here this year include a quad Salchow in their routine; the seventh, Marianne Jouvert of Switzerland, is expected to finish seventh.