Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future (3 page)

Sage shook his head, a gesture he had copied from Jamie and his friends. “The old empress hopes that the bo
y who sits on the throne will yet show some talent and, even if that doesn’t happen, she plans to breed the young princesses back into the line, certain that Lord Mathiah’s strong abilities will descend to their sons.”

“That means we are not forgotten,” Jamie said slowly.

Guard
s stood constantly at their doors now, but Adaeze and Lillianne were still princesses of the realm and even as the flashing lights and whirring sounds of what Claire still thought of as alien weapons resounded through the palace, no one objected when they decided to go for a walk with their mother. Not as long as they didn’t leave the complex of buildings that made up the royal residence.

Adaeze, grimly certain for a girl who was only thirteen, insisted Claire walk between the two girls. Convinced that her grandmother would not be at all
averse to seeing an ‘accident’ befall her daughter-in-law, she believed her mother needed that protection.

Claire, feeling sure an interchange of opinions occurred silently between the older of her daughters and the guard captain
, tried to appear as calm as she would have on any ordinary day within the Gare palace. Walking between the two girls, she even allowed herself an amusing mental image.

She felt like a bantam hen strolling
with two full-sized chicks, moving between her two tall daughters.

She was grateful that while she couldn’t communicate with the Aremians except through speech, neither could they sense her thoughts. Her mind was a blank tablet to those around her, something that made them think her limited.

She’d show them the people of Earth had a brilliance and resilience of their own.

And as for her girls, she had passed on to them half of that distant heritage where she had been just another girl from Chicago, resourceful enough to find her own way in a life independent of her abusive father and uncaring stepmother. All of that seemed long ago now. She had lived as the empress of the Aremian
Empire for half her life, but now she, who had relied so long on her husband’s abilities and position, would go back to being that fearless young fighter to save her daughters and herself from the horrors their grandmother and the Gare aristos had in mind for them.

They had to escape and as far as she could see only two possibilities lay before them. They could flee to the rebels on the pirate world of Kyria, or they could do their best to get to Jamie and her other friends on New London.

Underneath their clothing they had concealed a fortune in the most valuable of the jewels Mathiah had given her over the years. She could only hope that these would buy their way to Sanctuary. She didn’t think either of her daughters would like being pirates.

Well, maybe Adaeze would, but she was fairly sure Lillianne would turn up her pretty nose at the lifestyle of the rebellious people of Kyria.

With the help of loyal servants, they evaded the watching eyes and exchanged their elegant garments for the humble clothing worn by kitchen workers. Claire and Adaeze were able to hide their long hair underneath the bonnets that such simple women wore and Claire found herself dressed in the straight, short gown commonly worn by little girls.

She didn’t mind pretending to be a child again. It was like playing a role in a drama
, something she’d always enjoyed back at school. She might look like the infant of this trio, but her girls knew who was really there to be in charge and look after them.

In fifteen years of being the empress of one of the largest and most complicated societies in the known universe, she had learned a few things.

With the exception of the guards Mere had imported from the army, most of the people in the castle were loyal to her and the princesses. They had been absolutely devoted to the late emperor and he’d left her as regent. That was enough for them.

Eyes turned away, careful not to look too closely as they slipped one step at a time down to the lower levels of the palace and into the extensive caverns below.

“It’s so dark down here,” Lillianne whispered as they went deeper and deeper to areas unused for centuries. Claire reached out a hand for each girl pulling them closer to her.

“We’ve got to do this, Lilli,” Adaeze whispered fiercely. “I will not marry Cousin Varg! He’s pale and snotty nosed and mean. I’ve seen him torture animals.”

“I don’
t want to marry one of the cousins either.” Claire could feel her usually composed young daughter shiver. “I’m too young to be married.”

That was true. At eleven Lilli had not yet come into her womanhood, but Adaeze was already thirteen and the women of the Gare were usually given in marriage as soon as they could possibly conceive children in hope their offspring would carry the much desired far talking gift.

They whispered their grandmother’s plans to Claire as they crept along the darkened corridors of the lowest levels of the palace. Mere had made it clear to her granddaughters that Michel was only a temporary expedient unless, as sometimes happened, he carried a latent talent that might expose itself as he grew up.

But while they were hoping for that, Adaeze and Lillianne could provide new possibilities
in their progeny. And she was anxious to remove the negative influence of their mother from their lives.

That was Mere’s weakness. She was too candid. She
had admitted to her granddaughters that their mom was expendable.

This disclosure made them united in their determination to escape. Now they slipped out of the palace in the darkness, meeting a prearranged boatman on the Blue River that flowed past the palace, confining the
ongoing revolt to the other sides because of the deep and dangerous waters that guarded the south walls.

Looking like two servant girls and a child being taken away from the violence by a family member skilled at traveling the treacherous waters, they stood waiting for his approach.

The boatman, an aged but powerful man who had served Mathiah from the time he was a child and whose loyalty to his family had no bounds, saw them into the boat and with silent oars rowed them among other boats on the waterway, skillfully maneuvering through the swift waters away from the palace.

By the time Jamie and his cohorts left Terrainaine, they could feel the difference in the atmosphere. As they loaded the weapons they’d gained in trade for their peaches, Jamie sensed they were being watched by unfriendly eyes in this city where they had always been treated much as adored, though lesser beings. Now there was open hostility in their regard and Sage had warned them against returning anytime soon. He was sure that at any hour, he would receive an edict warning him against selling them anything resembling weapons.

Sage dared to publicly appear as their friend and supporter no longer. He and his family would be at risk if he did so.

He’d given them more than a fair trade and wished them the best before they left his market. The words had not been actually said, but Jamie knew anyway that he was warning them to prepare to defend themselves. He felt the bad old days were coming back.

As they climbed into their little truck with Karen as the most skillful driver behind the wheel, nobody approached to smile or perhaps exchange a word or two as they would normally have done. They only watched with hidden glances, a few even daring to stare.

No matter how they felt about the aliens who occupied New London, the people of Terrainaine realized policies had changed. Jamie sensed something different from hostility. They were being looked at with a kind of fearful pity.

They drove slowly until they were a few miles beyond the shining, metallic city with its tall windowless buildings, then without having to be told, Karen stepped up the pace and Jamie found himself hanging on with all his strength as they bumped across the desert at an alarming speed until they reached the mountains where they were met by a trio of their hardiest supporters, two of them Mack and Karen’s young sons.

Each carried a share of the modern Aremian weapons they’d bartered to gain as they climbed up and then down the mountains where, on their own side, another and swifter vehicle waited for them.

Once again Karen drove like a wild woman, expertly managing consistent high speeds even when they entered the lush terrain of the
ir own community with its obstacles of trees and creeks. Jamie knew he should breathe more easily now that he was back in home territory, but instead he was gripped with a terrible awareness that they had to get back with all due speed to warn the people of New London.

They had been chosen and brought here for a purpose and that purpose was once more alive and active.

Mack and Karen’s two boys began to engage in brotherly skirmishing and name-calling as the city that was their home came into sight just ahead of them. New London was a beautiful place with homes and public buildings designed like those in the warmer climates on Earth. The houses were long and low with graceful arches and colorful tiled roofs.

Large bladed p
lants and tall grasses, brilliantly colored flowers impacted eyes that had only too recently witnessed the subtle browns and tans of the desert. The people of Earth occupied less than one percent of the planet, but undoubtedly it was the best part.

They were all glad to be home, even if they were the bearers of bad news.

It was the wet season in New London and as they drove toward the center of the city, a heavy rain began to fall.

Old George greeted them after they pulled into the huge garage that was part of the old council building which they’d taken over as their headquarters after the city government had moved into newer, and in Jamie’s opinion less defensible headquarters. In the days when the original settlers had fought to their deaths to defend New London, this had been the most secure building in the city.

And Jamie and his followers had spent the last dozen years shoring it up, making it safer from the attacks they felt certain would finally come.

After securing the new firepower, they told George what they had learned and then sent messengers out to those like them who were ready to defend New London that it was time to take up residence here in their safest place.

Once Aremia, the original planet settled by hu
mans who had departed  for space in a wave of colonization that  occurred centuries before the western European cultures had even risen to recognizable civilization, had been a crowded planet, filled with its pueblo-style habitations. But these days only the most privileged lived on the empire’s governing world and so there were open spaces of cherished grasslands and carefully tended trees and other plants.

When Claire had first traveled throughout the planet as the new empress, she had thought it all reminded her too much of the huge public parks on Earth. Even the ‘wild’ animals were only of the more gentle species. They had no bears or tigers or elephants.

Of course on the Earth she’d left behind, such creatures only existed in carefully controlled habitants, but hers had also been a crowded planet.

Now, as she awakened from a night spent sleeping on the grass, their sleeping forms having been concealed by low growing shrubbery, the only fear she had
for her daughters were from the Aremians themselves. They had named their whole system after this carefully tended picture-perfect planet with its ancient culture.

Biting insects, stinging ants, creatures that barked, howled or snapped were not tolerated. This was a safe place for the empire’s two princesses to slumber.

She looked at them now, dark-haired Adaeze and fair Lillianne, and thought how much she loved them and how she would do anything, even give her own life to save them from the life their grandmother planned for them.

Once they’d left the river behind, she’d felt a little safer with the sounds of battle in the distance, though they could still hear the noise of exploding bombs in the distance and the night sky had been lit by the flash of weapons.

This was small scale warfare. Mere and her followers had seized control of most of the planet’s armaments, but they had no wish to do real damage to the beautiful home planet. The emperor’s guard was loyal to his memory, however, and would not quickly surrender their duty to his widow.

He had said Claire was to be regent and they would die trying to keep their promises to him. Strong as they were, however, they could not long withstand the armies of Aremia, now under the dowager empress’s control.

As the girls awakened, tired and hungry and perhaps close to shock, she began to tell them her plan.

“We’ll head for the spaceport today,” she told them briskly. “And take ship for Capron.”

Puzzled looks crossed their faces and they exchanged glances. It had been one of the difficult things about being the parent of mind talkers when she wasn’t one herself. They didn’t have to go behind her back to talk about her. And there was nothing she could do about it.

She couldn’t even punish them for being sassy. Of course when Mathiah was alive, he’d kept them from too much covert rebellion by insisting on courtesy to their mother even in their private speech. They had found it close to impossible to keep secrets from their father.

Now, she supposed, they were wondering if she’d cracked under the strain. Though, of course, they’d never use such an expression.

Claire couldn’t help grinning.
After having spent half her lifetime confined to the more formal speech patterns of Aremia that her new family used when addressing her, it was all coming back. Damn, but she felt like that scrappy Chicago girl again!

“Arrangements have been made for members of the Imperial Guard to meet us at the emperor’s ship and from
there; it’s off, off and away.”

They stared at her. “We’re going to Blood?” Lillianne asked with unusual timidity.

Claire frowned, hating the name the Aremians had given
her
planet. “No,” she said. “We’re not going to Sanctuary. I’ve had second thoughts. New London is already at risk and we can’t add to that by going there. Grandmere is fairly busy right now trying to head off a rebellion, but before long she’ll turn her attention back to us. And she’ll be in control of most of Sanctuary. I don’t want to put Jamie . . .that is the leaders of New London at extra risk trying to defend us.”

She remembered them all too well, the one hundred children chosen from her home planet to bring their blood as sacrifice to the Gare. Her own health was no doubt permanently compromised by those last days when Mathiah was no longer able to protect her.

She’d never known such pain and weakness as they injected chemicals into her body to bring her blood to the state needed to fight the hereditary disease that was torturing her husband as preliminary to taking his life. He’d begged them to leave her alone, but it hadn’t happened.

Many Earth youngsters from the original settlers on Sanctuary had died as they were mercilessly used by their captors.

“Then where are we going?” Adaeze asked in a hoarse voice.

“Like I said, Capron to start with and then after that, who knows? Maybe Kyria.”

Lillianne frowned. “Two pits of the universe. I hadn’t planned on being a barbarian.”

“You can always hike back to the palace. I’m sure Grandmere will welcome you with open arms and you will live your life surrounded in luxury,” her sister told her.

“Perhaps better than being a Kyrian pirate or a Capronian farmer.”

“Certainly. You could always marry Cousin Stepan. It wouldn’t matter that he drools and is six times your age.”

The girls rarely quarreled, at least in voices their mother could hear. She reminded herself that mature as they sometimes seemed Lillianne was just eleven and Adaeze only thirteen. She was the mom. She was in charge.

“Enough,” she said gruffly. “We still have to manage to stay alive long enough to get to the port and head out of here.”

Under her direction, they dug out the jewelry they’d buried under the bushes last night. She’d taken none of the crown’s property, but only the personal gifts Mathiah had made to her over the years. For her they held considerable personal value, like the twin blue diamonds he’d given her when the girls were born.

She couldn’
t afford sentiment anymore and the jewels were worth a fortune. She only hoped freedom and safety were on their shopping list.

They made their way back toward the city, blending in with the silent people on the street, two servant girls and their little sister. The Aremians were not a people given to displaying emotions on their faces, but she thought she
saw worry and even fear on some countenances.

Their long stable lives looked to be encountering some major changes with the death of the last far speaker of the Gare.

She wished she could hear what they were saying to each other, but knew she would have to wait for that info when the girls had time to brief her. Adaeze in particular was talented in intercepting messages from total strangers.

But nothing would draw more attention right now and in this place than talking to each other. It would be like putting a sign on herself saying,
‘Escaping former regent of the Gare.’

Except, hopefully, Mere still thought they were in their apartments, hiding out in sul
len resentment of the new order.

She was just thankful that everybody was too busy fighting everybody else to be trying to find them. Otherwise their attempt at escape would have most likely lasted about five minutes
tops.

No matter. Her two daughters, always accustomed to living in the greatest luxury, set off cross country with her, their hair unbrushed, their bodies unwashed and their stomachs empty.

If they complained, she didn’t hear them.

Jamie forced himself to sit still and let Isaiah do the talking. His intellectual friend was largely apolitical and served the community as a medical expert. It was hard to hate the person who had saved your son’s life or patched you up after you fell off the roof and broke your leg.

Isaiah didn’t exactly fit in as one of them, but he commanded tremendous respect while Jamie had become a lightning rod for controversy.

If the public felt that Isaiah ran with the wrong crowd, namely the group called the Defense League, they excused him on the grounds that he’d long been friends with Jamie, Mack and Karen.

Of course everybody knew how much they owed the four who had been their leaders during those first hard days on Sanctuary, but it was time to move on. No point demonizing the Gare and the people they ruled for what had occurred in the past.

Now Jamie sat with Mack, Karen, along with the two Russell boys and Isaiah’s daughter, drawing to their area of the new city hall’s comfortable seating those who were brave enough to face public censure by agreeing with them.

Isaiah, looking weary and frail, sat among the reps, including old George who was kind of an emeritus rep, on the raised stage in the middle of the huge forum
-type room.

Kevin Hartley, who went by the official title of mayor of  New London, was issuing a rather boring report on matters
with which most of those in the small community were already familiar.

Kevin, already balding at age thirty, and a little pudgy from lack of physical activity, flashed his toothy smile at the listeners and reported an increase of population of four from the births of infants in the last six months. Everybody clapped and cheered when he added that there had been no subtractions, nobody had died during that period.

“With our young population, we have been lucky enough to see few losses over the years,” he said. At these words everybody stared at old George, who was at an age few of them could imagine, as though he might drop dead at any minute.

They had mourned the loss of each of the
eleven other senior councilors who had been the only survivors left in Sanctuary when they arrived and now they looked to George as the slightly senile former fount of wisdom numbered among those who had saved them in the early years.

Years ago they’d named him as a permanent rep and now, Jamie smiled briefly at the thought, they didn’t know how to get him to retire from active participation.

“Mom, do we have to stay?” Charlie, the older of Mack and Karen’s two boys whispered loudly.

Karen glared at him and he subsided to whisper to his brother
.

Alice, Isaiah’s daughter, sat quietly taking everything in. Although two years younger than her dad had been when Jamie first met him, she reminded him a lot of the younger Isaiah, though fortunately she’d taken her slim blonde good looks from her late mother.

He listened while Kevin and other reps droned through the detailed facts and figures of the city’s dwellers and their accomplishments in the way of crops and building repair and construction.

According to Kevin, the now two hundred and eleven residents of New London were doing fine in this best of all possible worlds.

Not a cloud in the sky.
Jamie’s thoughts were of necessity grim. The news he and his friends had brought back to their city would surely wake them up to the need to prepare for a changing world.

Hell, the people of the varied worlds in the empire dominated by the central planet of Aremia were
n’t getting along too good among themselves. His people, the grownup children of New London and their children, would be no more than a footnote in Aremian history.

He tuned out as figure after figure was announced and discussed endlessly, thinking they could just have said it had been a good crop year and the cities utilities and repairs were going well.

His attention was caught when Kevin mentioned the recent trading mission to Terrainaine and how generously the Aremian residents had bargained for their delicious peaches. He credited the growers, than casually named Jamie, Mack and Karen as those who had taken the product to market.

How generous. Kevin didn’t like to say good things about the three people who were the flies in the ointment of his contentment
.

Now, having received permission to speak, Isaiah rose and Jamie’s attention sharpened to a keen
edge. He was a better speaker than his friend, he knew that, but he was discredited, reviled. They wouldn’t listen to him, but Isaiah was respected. Surely they would have to pay attention to what he had to say.

He saw Mack glance at his wife, saw her give her head a slight shake. None of them were exactly optimistic about how much they were going to be able to influence Kevin’s ‘peace at all costs’ policy.