The Trade of Queens (22 page)

“We disagree.” Huw slid the camera into an inner pocket of his own jacket. “You haven't spent enough time over there to know how they think, how they work.” He stood up as Yul stowed his spare magazines in a deep pocket. “Come on, let's go.” He slung a small leather satchel across his chest, allowed it to settle into place, then gave the strap a jerk: Nothing rattled.

It was a warm day outside, but the cloud cover threatened rain for the afternoon. Huw and Yul headed out into the run-down farmyard—now coming into a modicum of order as Helge's armsmen cleared up after the absent owners—then down the dirt track to the highway. The road into town was metaled but only wide enough for one vehicle, bordered by deep ditches with passing places every quarter mile. “They make good roads,” Yul remarked as they walked along the side. “Not as good as the Americans, but better than us. Why is that?”

“Long story.” Huw shook his head. “We're stuck in a development trap, back home.”

“A what trap?”

A rabbit bolted for safety ahead of them as the road curved; birds peeped and clattered in the trees to either side like misconfigured machinery. “Development. In the Americans' world there are lots of other countries. Some of them are dirt-poor, full of peasants. Sort of like home, believe it or not. The rich folks can import automobiles and mobile phones but the poor are just like they've always been. The Americans were that way, two hundred years ago—somewhere along the way they did something right. You've seen how they live today. Turns out—they've tried it a lot, in their world—if you just throw money at a poor country and pay for things like roads and schools, it doesn't automatically
get better
. The economists have a bunch of theories about why, and how, and what you need to do to make an entire nation lift itself up by its own bootstraps … but most of them are wrong. Not surprising, really; mostly economists say what the rich people who pay them want to hear. If they knew for sure, if there was one true answer, there'd be
no
underdeveloped nations.
We'd
have developed, in the Gruinmarkt, too, if there was a well-defined recipe. It's probably some combination of money, and institutions like the rule of law and suppression of corruption, and education, and a work ethic, and fair markets, and ways of making people feel like they can better themselves—social inclusion. But nobody knows for sure.”

A high stone wall appeared alongside the road, boundary marker to a country estate. “People have to be able to produce a bit more than they consume, for one thing. And for another, they have to know that if they
do
produce it—well, what does a lord do if his peasants are growing more food than they need?”

Yul shrugged. “What do you expect me to say, bro? They're his tenants!”

“Well, yeah, but.” They passed a spiked iron gate, head-high and closed, behind which a big house squatted with sullenly shuttered windows. The wall resumed. “Here's the thing. Our families became rich, and bought titles of nobility, and married into the aristocracy. And after a generation or two they
were
noble houses. But we're still stuck in a sea of peasants who don't make anything worth shit, who don't generate surpluses because they know some guy in a suit of armor can take it away from them whenever he likes. We've got towns and artisans and apothecaries and some traders and merchants and they're … you've seen the Americans. They're not smarter than us. They don't work harder than the peasants on your father's land. They're not—most of them—rich because they inherited it. But two hundred years ago things over there took a strange turn, and now they're overwhelmingly wealthy. These people are … they're better off than us: not as good as the Americans, but doing well, getting better. So
what are they doing right
?”

Huw stopped. The wall had come to an end, and ahead of them the road ran straight between a burned-out strip of row houses and a cleared field; but a group of four men had stepped into the highway in front of them, blocking the way ahead. They had the thin faces and hungry eyes of those who had been too long between hot meals.

“Yer bag. Give it 'ere,” said the thinnest, sharpest man. He held out a hand, palm-up. Huw saw that it was missing two fingers. The men to either side of the speaker, hard-faced, held crudely carved shillelaghs close by their sides.

“I don't think so,” replied Huw. He smiled. “Would you like to reconsider?” From behind his left shoulder he heard a rip of Velcro as Yul freed up his holster.

“They's the strangers wot moved on ole Hansen's farm,” the skinny man—barely more than a teenager—at the left of the row hissed sharply.

The speaker's eyes flickered sideways, but he showed no sign of attention. “Git 'em, lads,” he drawled, and the highwaymen raised their clubs.

Yul drew and fired in a smooth motion. His Glock cracked four times while Huw was persuading his own weapon to point the right way. The two club-men dropped like sacks of potatoes. The skinny lad's jaw dropped; he turned and bolted into the field.

“Aw,
shit
,” said the sharp-faced speaker. He sounded disgusted, resigned even, but he didn't run. “Yez party men, huh?” Huw strained to make the words out through a combination of ringing ears, the thunder of his own heartbeat, and the man's foreign-sounding accent.

“That's right!” He kept his aim on the highwayman's chest. Yul stayed out of his line of fire, performing an odd, jerky duck-walk as he scanned the sides of the road for further threats. “And you are…?”

“Down on me luck.” Abruptly, the highwayman sat down in the middle of the road and screwed his eyes shut fiercely. “G'wan shoot me. Better'n' starvin' to death like this past week. I'm ready.”

“No. You're not worth the bullet.” Huw stared at the highwayman over the sights of his pistol. A plan came to him. “You are under arrest for attempted robbery. Now, we can do this two different ways. First way is, we take you for trial before a people's court. They won't show you any mercy: Why should they? You're a highwayman. But the other way—if you want to make yourself useful to us, if you're very
useful
, my colleague and I can accidentally look the other way for a few seconds.”

“Forget it, citizen. He's a villain: Once a villain always a villain. Let's find a rope—” Yul was just playing bad cop. Probably.

“What do ye want?” The highwayman was looking from Yul to Huw and back again in fear. “Yer playin' with me! Yer mad!”

“Dead right.” Huw grinned. “On your feet. We're going into town and you're going to walk in front of us with your hands tied behind your back. The people's foe. And you know what? I'm going to ask you for directions and you're going to guide us truthfully. Do it well and maybe we won't hand you over to the tribunal. Do it badly—” He jerked his neck sideways. “Understand?”

The highwayman nodded fearfully. It was, Huw reflected, a hell of a way to hire a tour guide.

*   *   *

Framingham was a mess. From burned-out farmsteads and cottages on the outskirts of town to beggarmen showing their war wounds and soup kitchens on the curbsides, it gave every indication of being locked in a spiral of decline. But there were no further highwaymen or muggers; probably none such were willing to risk tangling with two openly armed men escorting a prisoner before them. Huw kept his back straight, attempting to exude unconscious authority.
We're party men, Freedom Riders. If nobody here's
seen
such before
 … well, it would work right up until they ran into the real thing; and when that happened, they could world-walk.

“We're going to the main post office,” Huw told the prisoner. “Then to”—he racked his memory for the name they'd plucked from a local newssheet's advertising columns—“Rackham's bookmaker. Make it smart.”

The main post office was a stone-fronted building in a dusty high street, guarded by half a dozen desperadoes behind a barricade of beer casks from a nearby pub. Rackham's was a quarter mile past it, down a side street, its facade boarded over and its door barred.

They turned into an alleyway behind the bookmaker's. “You have ten seconds to make yourself invisible,” Huw told his shivering prisoner, who stared at him with stunned disbelief for a moment before taking to his heels.

“Was that clever?” asked Yul.

“No, but it had to be done,” Huw told him. “Or were you really planning on walking into a people's tribunal behind him?”

“Um. Point, bro.” Yul paused. “What do we do now?”

“We sell this next door.” Huw tightened his grip on the satchel, feeling the gold ingots inside. “And then we go to the post office and post a letter.”

“But it's not running! You saw the barricades? It's the Freedom Party headquarters.”

“That's what I'm counting on,” Huw said calmly—more calmly than he felt. “They've got a grip on the mass media—the phones, the email equivalents, the news distribution system. They're not stupid, they know about controlling the flow of information. Which means they're the only people who can get a message through to that friend of Miriam's—the skinny guy with the hat. Remember the railway station?” Brilliana had coopted Huw and his team, dragged them on what seemed at first like a wild goose chase to a one-platform stop in the middle of nowhere. They'd arrived in the nick of time, as Miriam's other pursuers—a political officer and a carload of police thugs—had surrounded the ticket office where she and Erasmus Burgeson were barricaded inside. “The problem is getting their attention without getting ourselves shot. Once we've got it, though…” He headed towards the bookmaker's, where a pair of adequately fed bouncers were eyeing the passersby. “… we're on the way.”

*   *   *

The committee watched the presidential address, and the press conference that followed it, in dead silence.

The thirty-two-inch plasma screen and DVD player were alien intrusions in the wood-and-tapestry-lined audience room at the west of the royal palace. The portable gasoline generator in the antechamber outside throbbed loudly, threatening to drown out the recorded questions, played through speakers too small for a chamber designed for royal audiences in an age before amplification. The flickering color images danced off the walls, reflecting from the tired faces of the noble audience. Many of them still wore armor, camouflage surcoats over bulletproof vests and machine-woven titanium chain mail. They were the surviving officers of the Clan's security organization, and such of the Clan's other leaders as were deemed trustworthy, ignorant of or uninvolved in the abortive putsch mounted by the lords of the postal corvee. Wanted men, one and all.

Finally, Olga paused the DVD—recorded off-air by one of the few communications techs Riordan had ordered to stay behind in Cambridge. She looked around the semicircle of faces opposite, taking in their expressions, ranging from blank incomprehension to shock and dismay. “Does anyone have any questions, or can I move on to present our analysis?” she asked. “Strictly questions, no comment at this time.”

A hand went up at the back. Olga made eye contact and nodded. It was Sir Ulrich, one of the progressive faction's stalwarts, a medic by training. “Can they do it?” he asked.

“You heard him.” Olga's cheek twitched. Dread was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. “Let me remind you of WARBUCKS's history; he's a hawk. He was one of the main sponsors of the Project for a New American Century, he's the planner behind the Iraq invasion, and he's an imperialist in the old model. What most of you don't know is that back in the 1980s he was one of our main commercial enabling partners in the Western operation. And he's gone public about our existence. Getting back to your question: He's defined the success of his presidency in terms of his ability to take us down. The Americans will follow their king-emperor unquestioningly—as long as he delivers results. BOY WONDER used Iraq as a rallying cry after 9/11; WARBUCKS has pinned the target on us.”

“So you think—” Ulrich paused. “Sorry.”

“It's quite all right.” Olga gestured at the front rank. “My lord Riordan, I yield the floor.”

Riordan walked to the front of the room. “Thank you, Lady voh Thorold,” he started. Then he paused, and looked around at his audience. “I'm not going to tell you any comforting lies. We have lost”—he raised a folio and squinted at it—“thirty-nine world-walkers of our own, and sixty-six of the conservative faction. Eleven more are in custody, awaiting a hearing. Most of them we can do naught with but hang as a warning. Remaining to us in the five great families”—he swallowed—“we have a total of four hundred and sixteen who can world-walk regularly, and another hundred and nineteen elderly and infants. Twenty-eight womenfolk who are with child and so must needs be carried. In our offshoots and cadet branches there are perhaps two thousand three hundred relatives, of whom one thousand and seven hundred or thereabouts are married or coming into or of childbearing age. One hundred and forty one of their children are world-walkers.”

He stopped, and exchanged the folio for a hip flask for a moment.

“The American army is largely occupied overseas, for which we should be grateful. They have more than six hundred thousand men under arms, and five hundred warships, and with their navy and air forces their military number two warriors for every peasant in the Gruinmarkt. Our account of Baron Hjorth's treachery is that he purloined no less than four but certainly no more than six of their atomic bombs. That leaves them with”—he consulted the folio—“ah,
six thousand
or thereabouts, almost all of which are more powerful than those Oliver Hjorth absconded with.” He closed the folio and stared at his audience.