Even though she was barely conscious, Claire stayed constantly aware that her worst enemy hovered over both of them like the figure of death itself. The dowager empress was giving the orders now.

Weak as she was and attached to medical tubing and stuck with needles, she could still see her husband, lying on the table only feet away from her. The emperor Mathiah the tenth, Gare speaker for all the people of his multi-planet kingdom was dying of the hereditary illness that spread madness and death among the gifted males of his privileged family.

His father had died of the same disease only after wreaking terrible havoc across the empire, a once revered leader who had descended into a wild and terrible insanity that left him renegade and lifted his son to an unwanted throne.

Long ago Mathiah made her promise
she would kill him before he was reduced to that state, if he so lost his judgment as not to be able to seek his own death.

She thanked the God of Earth that he’d been spared that fate and, though she already mourned the man who had started out as enemy and captor and ended as beloved husband, she wished him a speedy death to end the torture he now endured.

She would have desired the same for herself and even now this was not an unlikely outcome. As blood donor for her alien husband, her life would be spent freely to gain a few more hours of life for the last known far speaker in the empire.

And his mother, the dowager empress, who had always detested
the daughter-in-law born on Earth, was here for that very reason. She would gladly sacrifice Claire in the hopeless battle to save her son. In fact she would prefer Claire to die before him.

If she lived, Claire, a member of
a race the Gare barely considered human, would be named by her husband’s command regent for the distant cousin who would inherit his throne.

But Claire fought now to live. She had to
survive long enough to see Adaeze and Lillianne to safety. As possible carriers of the gene that gave the empire’s leaders their far speaking abilities and the curse of the terrible disease that was now killing their father, they would become pawns in the hands of their grandmother if she was gone.

She had promised Mathiah she would live to see the two princesses to safety. Now she fought with every ounce of her always stubborn will to fulfill that promise while her husband of fifteen years painfully died.

ONE

Like Winston Churchill trying to convince his nation
’s people they faced a threat they preferred to pretend didn’t exist, Jamie Lewis Ward had spent the last dozen years preaching the gospel that the Gare were a continuing threat to the people of New London.

Once their respected leader, he had been reviled and even laughed at by the population he’d once led. He hadn’t served in public office in half a dozen years. Instead they were led by Kevin Hartley, who gladly accepted the comforts offered by the Gare and their empire, and talked
rarely about the bad old days when they’d regularly had to sacrifice some of their youngsters to save the lives of Gare aristos.

That was then, this was now. No Earth
er residents of the planet Sanctuary had been chosen and taken since the emperor Mathiah had married one of their own and assumed the place of power.

Kevin considered the Gare to be a powerful supporter of the colony occupied by transplants from Earth. Grimly, Jamie had hung on, spreading his unpopular beliefs that they were safe only as long as Mathiah and his wife Claire lived and remained in power and then after that
, the deluge would come.

He’d drilled his small group of supporters in battle skills and they’d done everything they could to build up weapon supplies and secure some of the central buildings. They’d dug out underground bunkers.

They were subjects of ridicule while the people of New London put their efforts into their gardens and the newly restored homes originally provided to their predecessors by the Gare, building families, a school, small hospital, stores and other tools of civilization. Since they had all started out as one hundred fifteen-year-old conscripts, these things were a major achievement and Jamie was proud of them at the same time he remained fearful.

And now that the fifteen-year-olds were all approaching their thirtieth birthdays, he was waiting for the other shoe to fall. The emperor who had been so friendly to them, Mathiah the tenth had died five months ago.

Kevin and his followers had pointed out triumphantly that nothing terrible had happened. “Not yet,” Jamie said.

They laughed. He supposed this was how Noah had felt as he built the
ark, anticipating the flood that God said would come. He went on working, hoping to save not only his own family, but others.

Even more he imagined himself a Churchill, warning a population that could not bear to think of another terrible war that their neighboring
country was increasing its stockpile of tanks, guns and ships.

And he wondered about Claire, the black-haired
blue-eyed girl he hadn’t seen in fifteen years. The girl who had married Mathiah and become empress of the Gare.

Hundreds of thousands of people crowded the square in front of Palace de Gare and Claire was terrified when they waved their hands wildly in the air as the two princesses appeared but gave only feeble signs of pleasure at the sight of their new eight-year-old emperor.

Her daughters, Adaeze and Lill
ianne, accustomed their whole lives to public appearances with their late father, walked across the balcony to stand at her side with total poise while their little cousin, Michel, squirmed uncomfortably, tired and bored from the long afternoon of ceremonies that were supposedly endowing him with absolute power in the empire of Aremia.

In reality it was actually Claire who was meant to be the real power behind the throne according to her husband’s will, but she didn’t even have to glance at the dowager empress’s stony face to know how doubtful her position was.

The loyalty of the empire was divided. Girls couldn’t rule, just as they didn’t inherit the abilities of the far speaker, but only carried the genes to gift their sons. But neither Michel or any of the other sons of the royal house of Aremia evidenced that much valued gift.

Little Michel held the strongest position, named by his cousin as inheritor of the empire, but there were many who opposed this decision. And as for Michel himself, he couldn’t care less, being more interested in toys and sweets than kingdoms, but his powerful family suffered no such delusions.

Woe be to the land ruled by a child
, Claire remembered reading once. She and Mathiah had so hoped he could live long enough for their daughters to be grown, but it hadn’t happened and now she had to use all the wiles her husband had taught her over the years just to keep them alive.

They were in danger, her Adae
ze and Lillianne, just because as the former emperor’s daughters they presented an opportunity for dissenters to claim the throne in their names.

Claire stood straight and as tall as she could, acting as though she could actually hear the words of the hundreds of years old traditional ceremony. In fact, she was the only one who didn’t follow those words. How could she? She required verbal speech, words spoken out loud, while these people of Aremia communicated mind to mind and considered those who needed actual sound to be inferior animals, barely above the beasts of field and wild.

Mentally Claire shrugged, thinking sarcastically that she couldn’t help if she was merely a castoff Earther. Almost as though she sensed her mother’s feelings, the older of the two girls, thirteen-year-old Adaeze, reached out to touch Claire’s hand lightly while eleven-year-old Lillianne continued to stare straight ahead. With her frosty burr of hair and her chiseled features, she looked much like her grandmother, while Adaeze took more characteristics from her black-haired mother, though her hair never grew long enough to more than touch her shoulders while Claire’s own silken strands reached halfway down her back.

It was another way in which she was different from the aliens among whom she had come to live. Aremian men were totally hairless, while most women only had a frizzle of light-colored hair on their heads.

And they were tall, very tall, many of the men reaching seven feet or more, while a woman under six feet in height was considered rather short.

Claire measured exactly five feet four, which didn’t exactly lend her natural authority in their midst.

By the time the ceremony ended, Claire had never been so weary in her whole life. She could only imagine how the children felt. As they exited the platform, Michel going first, then Claire as regent, Adaeze, Lillianne, and finally, the dowager empress, the crowds, of course remained silent, though she knew if she looked back hands would be raised in the traditional salute.

Michel’s caretaker took him away immediately for supper and
bedtime; Mere following importantly as though the little emperor instead of the girls was her grandchild. No surprise, Claire thought with an audible sigh, the empress followed power and she had never cared much for her granddaughters anyway. They were mongrels, born to her son and his Earth-raised wife.

Claire had always thought that her husband’s
Mere loved his position more than she loved her son. Now she was sure of it.

Her daughters, both taller already than she was, took over, looking after her more than she looked after them as they saw her back to the relative privacy of their new quarters. Michel and his servants now occupied
the royal suite that had been their home as long as Mathiah lived.

Adaeze and Lillianne might be only youngsters, but they were old in the wisdom of the realm. Their father had known they had little luxury for
lingering in childhood and Adaeze in particular was as aware of their danger as her mother.

She watched with eyes
blue as her mother’s as Claire sank into a chair designed for the larger bodies of the Gare, glad that this awful day was finally at an end.

“The emperor said they would build revolutions around us,”
Adaeze said now, still standing.

Lillianne
sat down next to her mother. Strangely, though she looked so much like her grandmother, she also had Claire’s blue eyes. “You should be empress,” she told her sister, “not that baby Michel.”

Both girls had used verbal speech since infancy, though like others of their father’s race, they could communicate mind-to-mind without sound. But since their mother had no such ability, they had responded from the first to her speech.

Mathiah had encouraged this and spoken verbally to all three of them even in public. It was another reason Mere disdained them. Her son’s family embarrassed her.

“It isn’t like that,” Adaeze told her sister in no-nonsense terms. “We will be figureheads for a revolt and they will kill us.
Father said we must flee as soon as possible. He said we must go to Mom’s people. They will hide and protect us. We will live normal lives.”

Claire had to repress near-hysterical laughter. The girls always used the ‘mom’ she had taught them rather than the Aremia title for a female parent of ‘mere.’
For Mathiah, they had used the more formal Earth title of father.

“What is normal?” she asked.

“I don’t really know,” Adaeze replied. “But I will enjoy finding out.”

So young. Wise in theory because of their father’s teachings, but innocent in experience. How was she possibly going to be able to keep them alive, much less give them any kind of a life?

Even if she got them back to Sanctuary and New London, they’d never be accepted there. They were born of the enemy race that had enslaved the people, torturing their young to save the lives of their leaders.

Most likely everybody back there hated her as a traitor. Well, perhaps not everybody. She hoped her friends still remembered her with some affection.

She thought of them as she had each day of her imprisonment. They were Jamie, Isaiah and Mack, the first real friends she’d ever had. The only friends she had now that her husband was dead.

Jamie Lewis Ward, the boy with whom she’d almost fallen in love. He would help her save her daughters.

Old George was the last surviving elder and the man Jamie went to when he was most troubled. Shrunken in inches and moving with some difficulty these days, George refused to retire to the proverbial rocking chair and kept busy training the younger generation in the multiple skills he himself possessed.

A general favorite among the young settlers and their children, he could get away with saying out loud the opinions that made Jamie so unpopular these days. “They’ll come for us again,” he told the three young men who sat on the grassy slope around him.

They liked to meet out here in the low hills just outside of town where they could look over the restored
and graceful villas of New London with its bright plantings of flowers and greenery. In the distance a river wove its narrow way like a snake inching to the mountains that divided the land of the Earth settlers from the rest of the planet where the people of the Aremian Empire had established themselves long before the newcomers had stepped foot on the planet they called Sanctuary.

He never forgot, however, that the Gare leaders of Aremia called the planet Blood.

Old George had seen his own generation destroyed, leaving alive only the twelve elders, who had guided the community, to suffer the loss of their children.

Now they were all gone but him and he often said to Jamie, as he did now, “I’d be more than ready to pass on if I didn’t feel I was still needed” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Damn if I don’t miss that Sylvie.”

Jamie smiled back. They all missed Sylvie. She had been grandmother to the fifteen-year-olds who had been abandoned here.

Isaiah interrupted the nostalgia, obviously feeling they had indulged enough. “Maybe they’ll forget about us,” he said. “From the news we’re getting from Terrainaine, there’s a lot going on back on the home planet
.” For years now the people from New London had been tolerated in Sanctuary’s only other city where they went to barter for needed goods.

Jamie studied the face of his old friend. Isaiah had been his first acquaintance among the youngsters who had been sent to Sanctuary to replace its lost population, and they had remained
close through the years. Like him, Isaiah believed they could not afford to relax their guard.

Isaiah still looked much the same, a man of slight build and somewhat delicate
constitution; he was unusually bright and always offered Jamie keen insights.

Mack, the sturdily built black man who was his other best friend, uttered half a dozen words of profanity in his deep voice. “Somebody will think of us any minute now and Kevin Hartley will rue the day he tried to pretend the Gare and their people were our allies.

Mack, the son of a space engineer, had been the only one of the friends who had come to Sanctuary with space experience and much needed skills that had helped the community survive.

Jamie felt humble compared to them. He was just an Oklahoma farm boy who had been brought up by grandparents with a lot of common sense, but somehow his friends had propelled him to leadership in those early days.

Now he nodded solemnly. “They’ll come back for us. They’ll come back for our blood.”

All three of them looked to old George, who nodded his agreement.
“I’m only surprised they haven’t already shown up.”

BOOK: Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future

2.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads