The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (56 page)

‘Oh, Mother.’ Patricia put her wineglass down. ‘This is most harsh, this news.’ A hesitancy crept into her voice.

‘Bear with me.’ Hildegarde raised a slightly shaky hand and closed her eyes, as Patricia picked up the decanter with both hands and refilled their glasses. ‘I have always acted
for what I perceived to be the best interests of our braid. I had hoped you would understand that, and at least not stand in my way, but by poisoning my natural heir against me . . . Well,
it’s too late to undo that.’ She opened her eyes and blinked rheumily at her daughter. ‘May you have better luck with your grandchild. Angelin’s great-grandchild.’

‘If it arrives. Consanguinuity – ’

‘It will be all right, child. Helge and Creon were second cousins, and Creon’s ailment was a consequence of poisoning, not inbreeding. We risk worse with every twist of the braid.
The hazard is minimal.’

‘Miriam won’t see it that way, you know.’

‘
Miriam
– what an odd name. Where did you get it from?’

‘The same place I got Iris. And Beckstein. She answers to it, you know. You might have gotten better results from her if you’d called her by the name she prefers.’

‘Perhaps. But it’s not her name, it’s a disguise. Where would we be if people could pick and choose their own names? Nobody need recognize their seniors – there would be
anarchy! Or another strong man like Angbard would grab everybody by the throat and rule by
force majeure
. A rogue, that boy. But listen, I have a few months, perhaps a year or two. And
seeing that Angbard was ill, I decided to move now, to detach his slippery followers’ fingers from the reins of power and hand them back to their rightful owner – a woman of the line,
or a lord working as her agent, as is right and proper.
You
, Patricia. You have a grandchild in the great game, or you will soon – you will act in their name. Once the hangers-on and
opportunists are purged, once Angbard’s security apparatus is emptied of dangerous innovators and cut back to its original size and scope, you will inherit the full power of my position, and
they’ll love you. Complete freedom of action. I never had that, girl, but
you will
.’

Patricia stared at Hildegarde for almost a minute. Presently, she closed her mouth. ‘You’re not joking.’

‘You know me, girl. Do I ever joke?’

Patricia opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it again. ‘Let me get this straight. You had your granddaughter forcibly inseminated with your sister’s grandson’s sperm so
that you could reassert our cadet branch’s claim to the throne. You had me kidnapped and brought here so that we could kiss and make up. You’re dying of cancer, so you decided to set up
Miriam’s kid for the throne by destroying Angbard’s security organization, just as the old nobility are getting over the civil war and wondering what we’re going to unleash on
them next. And you nuked the White House to send a message to Dick Cheney. Am I missing anything?’

‘Yes.’ Hildegarde’s self-satisfaction came to the fore: ‘Who do you think taunted Egon about his younger brother’s marriage? Someone had to do it – otherwise
we’d never have pried his useless ass off the throne! It would have set us back at least two generations.’

Patricia picked up her wineglass and drained it for the third time. ‘Mother, I have a confession to make. Miriam once told me she thought you were a scheming bitch, and I’m afraid I
defended your honor. I take it all back. You’re
completely
insane!’

‘Let us pray that it runs in the family, then. As for your confession – consider yourself forgiven. I shall be relying on your cunning once I surrender to you, you realize.’
Hildegarde reached out and pulled the bell rope – ‘
More wine, damn your eyes!
I insist on getting drunk with my daughter at least once before I die. Yes, I’m insane. If
insanity is defined by wanting to put my great-grandchild on the throne, I’m mad. If it’s crazy to want to strangle the ghouls that crowd around the royal crib and break the private
army that threatens our autonomy, I’m all of that. I bent the Clan and the Kingdom to serve you and your line, Patricia, and I find at the end of my days that I regret nothing. So. Once you
are in charge of the Clan, what do you think you will do with it?’

‘I haven’t made my confession yet, Mother.’ Patricia looked at the dowager oddly. ‘It would have been good to have had this heart-to-heart a little earlier –
perhaps a year ago. I’m afraid we’re both too late . . .’

*

An hour after Miriam and her guards and allies arrived at the farmstead, the place was abuzz with Clan Security. There were several safe transfer locations in the state forest,
and one of Earl-Major Riordan’s first orders had been to summon every available soldier – not already committed to point defense or the pursuit of the renegade elements of the postal
service and the conservative club – to establish a security cordon.

Miriam, sick at heart, sat in one corner of the command post, listening – the fast, military Hochsprache was hard to follow, and she was catching perhaps one word in three, but she could
follow the general sense of the discussion – and watching as Riordan took reports and consulted with Olga and issued orders, as often as not by radio to outlying sites. The headquarters
troops had set up a whole bunch of card indexes and a large corkboard, startlingly prosaic in a field headquarters in a fire-damaged farmhouse, and were keeping a written log of every decision
Riordan handed down. A hanging list of index cards had gone up on one wall, each card bearing a name: Baron Henryk, Baron Oliver, Dowager Duchess Thorold-Hjorth. Miriam carefully avoided trying to
read the handwritten annotations whenever a clerk updated one of them. Ringleaders they might be, and in some cases bitter enemies, but they were all people she knew, or had known, at court. A
similar list hung on the opposite wall, and it was both longer and less frequently updated – known allies and their disposition.

‘Why not computerize?’ she’d asked Brill, in a quiet moment when the latter had sat down on the bench beside her with a mug of coffee.

‘Where are we going to get the electricity to run the computer from?’ Brill replied. ‘Batteries need charging, generators need fuel. Best not to make hostages to fate.
Besides,’ she glanced at the communications specialist bent over the radio, ‘computers come with their own problems. They make treachery easier. And it’s a small enough squabble
that we don’t need them.’

‘But the Clan – ’ Miriam stopped.

‘We know all the main players. By name and by face. We know most of our associates, too.’ The world-walkers, children of latent, outer-family lines, not yet fully integrated into the
Clan of which they were branches. ‘We are few enough that this will be over – ’ Brill stopped. The communications specialist had stood up, hunching over his set. Suddenly he
swore, and waved urgently at Olga. Olga hurried over; a moment later Riordan joined her.

‘What’s going on?’ Miriam stood up.

‘I don’t know.’ Brill’s face was expressionless. ‘Nothing good by the look of it.’

Olga turned towards them, mouthed something. She looked appalled.

‘Tell me,’ Miriam demanded, raising her voice against the general hubbub of urgent questions and answers.

Olga took two steps towards her. ‘I am very sorry, my lady,’ she said woodenly.

‘It’s Plan Blue?’

Olga nodded. ‘It is all over the television channels,’ she added softly. ‘Two nuclear explosions. In D.C.’

For a moment everything in Miriam’s vision was as gray as ash. She must have staggered, for Brilliana caught her elbow. ‘What.’ She swallowed. ‘How bad?’

‘We do not know yet, my lady. That news is still in the pipeline. We have’ – she gestured at the radio bench – ‘other urgent priorities right now. But there are
reports of many casualties.’

Miriam swallowed again. Her stomach clenched. ‘Was this definitely the work of, of the conservative faction?’

‘It is reasonable to suppose so, but we can’t be certain yet.’ Olga was peering at her, worried. ‘My lady, what do you – ’

‘Because if it was their doing, if it was anything to do with the Clan, then we are
fucked
.’ She could see it in her mind’s eye, mushroom clouds rising over the Capitol,
and a bleak vision of a future far more traumatic than anything she’d ever imagined. ‘We’re about to lose all access to the United States. They won’t rest until
they’ve found a way to come over here and chase us down and kill us. There won’t be anywhere we can run to in their world or this one that’s far enough away for safety.’

‘Even if it was not Baron Hjorth’s doing, even if we had nothing to do with it, we would not be secure,’ Brilliana pointed out. ‘We know that the vice president has
reason to want us dead. This could be some other’s work, and he would still send his minions to hunt us.’

‘Damn.’ Miriam swallowed again, feeling the acid tang of bile at the back of her mouth. ‘Think I’m going to throw up.’

‘This way, milady’ – everyone was solicitous towards the mother-to-be, Miriam noted absentmindedly, up to and including making decisions on her behalf, as if she were a passive
object with no will of her own –

It was raining outside, and the stench from the latrines round the side of the house completed the job that the news and the anxiety and the morning sickness had started. Her stomach cramped as
she doubled over, spitting bile, and waited for the shooting pain in her gut to subside. Brill waited outside, leaving her a token space.
I’m alone,
she realized despondently.
Alone, surrounded by allies and sworn vassals, some of whom consider themselves my friends. I don’t think any of them truly understand
. . . Her thoughts drifted back towards the
sketchily described horrors unfolding down south, and her stomach clenched again. By the time she finished, she found she had regained a modicum of calm.
They don’t know what’s going
to happen,
she realized.
But I do.
Miriam had been living in Boston through the crazy days that followed 9/11. And she’d seen the lock-step march to the drumbeat of war that
followed, seen the way everybody rallied to the flag. In the past few weeks and months, a tenuous skepticism had been taking hold, but nothing could be better calculated to extinguish it than a
terrorist outrage to dwarf the fall of the Twin Towers. The only question was how long it would take the US military to gear up for an invasion, and she had an uneasy feeling that they were already
living on borrowed time.

‘Milady?’ It was Brill.

‘I’m better. For now.’ Miriam waved off her offered hand and took a deep breath of rain-cleansed air. ‘I’m going to lie down. But. I need to know how bad it is,
what the bastards have done. And as soon as Riordan and Olga have a free minute I need to talk to them.’

‘But they’re going to be – ’ Brill stopped. ‘What do you need to distract them with?’

‘The evacuation plan,’ Miriam said bluntly.

‘What plan – ’

‘The one we need to draw up
right now
to get everyone across to New Britain. If we don’t’ – she raised her head, stared across the seared fields towards the tree
line at the edge of the cleared area – ‘we’re dead, or worse. I know what my people – sorry, the Americans – are capable of. We don’t stand a chance if we stay
here. One way or another, the Clan is finished in the Gruinmarkt; this whole stupid cockamamie scheme to put a baby on the throne is pointless now. The only questions remaining are which direction
we run, and how far.’

*

A steady stream of couriers, security staff, and refugees trickled into the farmstead over the hours following Miriam’s evacuation. By midafternoon, Earl Riordan had sent
out levies to round up labor from the nearest villages, and by sunset a large temporary camp was taking shape, patrolled by guards with assault rifles. The farm itself was receiving a makeover in
the shape of a temporary royal residence: However humble it might be by comparison with the palaces of Niejwein, it was far better than the tents and improvised bivouacs of the soldiers.

Despite her ongoing nausea, Miriam followed Riordan and Olga and their staff when they moved into a pavilion beside the farmhouse. ‘You should be lying down, taking things easy,’
Brilliana said, halfheartedly trying to divert her.

‘The hell with that. These are my people, aren’t they? I need to be here.’
And I need to know
. . . The sense of dread gnawing at her guts was beyond awful.

In the late afternoon, despite the apparent defection of most of the Clan postal office’s lords to the traitors’ side – at least, it was hard to put any other interpretation on
their total failure to comply with the executive head of Clan Security’s increasingly heated orders to report – they managed to establish a solid radio network with the other security
sites in the Gruinmarkt; and the New York office was still sufficiently functional to arrange a three-hourly courier run with digital video tapes from the Anglischprache world’s news feeds.
Shortwave and FM didn’t have the bandwidth to play back video, but the headlines off the wire services were more than enough to make Miriam sick to her stomach and leave Brilliana and Sir
Alasdair anxious for her health.

But there was even more important news.

At first there was nothing more than a knot of turmoil around the table where Olga and three clerical assistants were coordinating intelligence reports and updating the list of known survivors
and victims of the coup attempt. ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sir Alasdair, making his way back towards Miriam. ‘It can’t be a coincidence!’ His expression was
glazed, distant.