As we trod up the gold-edged marble stairs toward the huge entrance, PJ started ranting at the man with the gold chain, while sending nasty looks at us. Especially at me. “When everyone knows his proper place then there’s order and decorum. Show respect, that’s what Mumsie says. If you don’t make them show respect, then they won’t respect you ...” He droned on, his voice that irritating mixture of whiny and pompous. “So don’t forget to put that stupid peasant with the cart in prison, until he learns respect for the crown.”
“Yes Your Royal Highness,” the man said, and gestured to a woman in livery, who scurried up a marble hall decorated with a row of marble statues of a woman in a grand pose, with beautiful features — later I learned these statues were supposed to be Glotulae at different stages of her youth and young womanhood — all decorated with silk flowers painted in shiny crimson, pink, yellow, with gold leaves. On walls, ground, even the ceiling there were lots and lots of polka dots and little rayed stars everywhere. I finally had to lower my eyes and watch my feet. Some of the colors were so jarring it made me feel just on the edge of dizzy, because they’d flicker in a creepy way.
By the time we got to the throne room, what seemed about thirty of those tall fellows had closed in behind us.
The throne room. Well, if I were to describe all the colors, styles, types of materials, and jewels, it would take about a year to write down.
But I’ll try to get in just some of it. Imagine lace festooned around marble columns, topped with carved crowns of real gold — huge rubies set in them — with silk fringes hanging down. Big silken bows below the crowns. A pink marble floor with tiles of a million colors inset in daisy and rose shapes and different sizes of polka-dots. Down the middle lay a woven rug of crimson, pink, and yellow, with gold fringes, the yellow and pink being worked into the crimson in big rose shapes — all surrounded by big dots. Not the same shapes as the floor roses, but really frilly ones.
The throne was the biggest I have ever seen — ever. The ones in Sartor and Colend were milking stools by comparison, I found out on later adventures. The back reached all the way up to the ceiling, which had to be a hundred feet up. There was a canopy made of festoons of yellow silk with pink fringes, and up at the top a gigandor crown made of stiffened gold lace. The throne sported gems all around the back and arms, and lots more gold-worked lace and fringes and pompons. I couldn’t tell what the throne had originally been made of; now it was upholstered in really bright orange velvet all embroidered with flower shapes, and polka dots in every color with a jewel at the center of each.
On this throne sat a big woman, tightly corseted so she stuck out in front kind of like the prow of a ship. A strong perfumy smell wafted our way as we neared, and PJ ran (as well as he could run in those clothes, which wasn’t very) up to her. She leaned a little forward, listening, as the liveried servant mumbled something from her prone position on the floor.
“Mumsie,” PJ snapped, stepping on the prone servant’s clothes as he splatted past.
“What is this interruption, Grand Steward?” the woman demanded in a querulous version of her son’s voice, both whiny and arrogant.
“As you see, Your Gracious Majesty,” the man with the chain thingie said, bowing three times and then dropping to one knee.
Glotulae glared down at us, and I stared at her. She had on more make-up than movie-stars in LA: crimson lip paint, and bright red rouge, and black eyeliner with blue above. That latter was so bright it made the blue of her eyes look sickly and washed out.
“I loathe common children,” she announced, smirking at several men and women seated adjacent.
I’d been taking in the throne room and Queen Glotulae so I hadn’t even noticed this crowd of grownups. There were maybe twenty of them or so, playing cards or fanning themselves, all of them dressed in bright colors, though none so bright as their queen.
The ladies put down their cards, rose, curtseyed all the way to the ground, and tittered. The men bowed three times.
“Well said, Your Gracious Majesty!” came several voices.
“That was supposed to be — ” Irene began in a loud aside to me.
“I loathe common children unless they are properly dressed, respectful, and employed in their proper sphere.”
“Delightfully put, Your Gracious Majesty!” somebody said in a toadying voice that would have made me suspicious.
“ — a joke?” Irene finished.
Half of the ladies, I realized, wore caps like Glotulae’s — sort of a conical satin cap, with a lace veil coming down to just above the eyebrows. This called attention to the queen’s oddly painted eyebrows, a kind of perky arch with a point in the middle that nature had never made on any human being. Her cap had gold spikes with jewels at the tips — a crown. I found out later that those caps were her own fashion invention, signifying an unmarried young lady.
“Take the brats away.” She waggled her beringed hands, then plunged her fingers into a golden bowl of pastries, plucked one up, and took a dainty bite. I noticed she didn’t offer any to her company, who sat down and resumed their gaming or fanning.
PJ’s face was all powdery — he was stuffing his second cream-pastry into his mouth. “That girl insulted me,” he said, custard splatting down onto his tunic from his mouth. “Kill her.” The half-eaten pastry waved in my direction.
“Now, now, dear boy. We do have laws.” Glotulae patted his pimply cheek with her powdery fingers. “Which did she break?”
I decided it was time for me to get busy. “I am Princess Cherene Jennet Sherwood of Mearsies Heili,” I said. “And your son rode straight at a man driving a cart full of porcelain, and it overturned. But he blamed the man. I didn’t think that was fair, or right.”
“‘Princess’?” Glotulae fleered. And, again over her shoulder, “‘Princ-essssss?’”
The company rose, bowed, and laughed again, all of it as automatic as a TV laugh track, and about as real-sounding. “Clever hit, Your Gracious Majesty!” someone called.
Glotulae turned her sneer on me. “So what’s that foolish brat hiding on her mountain trying now? She appears to have appointed another brat as her ‘prin-cess.’”
Pause for the court to bow, and laugh. They did.
“Has she also appointed herself an army of brats to come rescue you, hmmm?”
PJ laughed loudly.
Think! Think! No one is coming to help. But —
“I don’t need an army,” I declared. “Because I have magic.” My heart was really driving on the Indy 500 now.
Did she have magic too?
“Oh, of course,” she scoffed, sending another glance at her court. “Magic. Easily available at every market stall.”
They rose, bowed, tittered. “Telling blow, Your Gracious Majesty!”
“Watch.”
I brought my trembling fingers up, and performed an illusion spell I’d been practicing to try on Faline when the time was right. I waved my hands, pointed at PJ — and the air glittered around him briefly, then cleared, and there was a huge pig snout over his nose!
Gasps of shock — and one muffled laugh from a man that got turned hastily into a coughing fit.
Glotulae screamed!
PJ looked around, bewildered. “What? What?”
“Get out! Get out!” The powder-smeared finger pointed at me.
“Oh, glad to,” I said loudly. “But just remember, those people like that cart driver are really Mearsieans, and if you mistreat them, you’ll see me again. A lot!”
I turned around and walked out.
Glotulae screamed something at me, but it was hard to hear over PJ’s sudden wail. He couldn’t see the snout, for it was illusion only, but someone had obviously whispered it to him.
We could still hear their combined laments when we reached the outer chambers.
“Let’s run,” I suggested.
We did.
TEN — Some Lessons in Magic
I’d felt somehow that my name, and my being Cl
air’s second, somehow constituted a sacred duty. I should never invoke the name and rank unless the cause was truly good.
And so I was apprehensive when we got back at last to the Junky and then reported up to Clair in the White Palace. I wondered if she’d be mad, or if not mad, disappointed in me, somehow feeling that I’d done wrong.
But she didn’t. She grinned as we told the story, and nodded when I told her my last threat to Glotulae. “An excellent idea,” she exclaimed. “Good work, Cherene. I wish I’d thought of it!”
So I went back down to the girls feeling very high hearted indeed. In my experience, though adults were quick to punish the tiniest infraction, when you actually did something right, that was just what was expected — there was never any praise.
Here, everything was different. There were no grownups forcing you to do what they said, while expecting you not to notice how they didn’t obey their own rules. Here there really appeared to be right and wrong — not just power and powerless — and so I struggled to do what was right. I struggled all the more because Clair never once told me to ‘do right’. It never seemed to occur to her that I might not; but when I did something right, I could see in her quick smile, the tone of her quiet voice, that she appreciated it. That she appreciated me.
Of course that part of me that was squashed so on Earth still relishes the struggle against evil, and I have to admit that few things give me more of a thrill than an easily identifiable villain to hate. And wasn’t PJ and his disgusting mother just about perfect villains?
Well, ‘right’ and ‘evil’ still weren’t always easy to define.
Like that first night, when we celebrated. I had introduced the girls to tacos, my favorite food. Janil had learned the ingredients and always had them on hand, and Clair put together a complicated series of spells — based on how ships got food from specialty restaurants on shore — so we could summon them when we wanted. The food gets prepared and then kind of disappeared from space and time, until you summon it back, all hot and ready.
And so, over a dinner of hot chocolate, we gloated over our successful mission, made up a new nickname for Glotulae (Dhana thought it a pretty name — liquidy sounding — and we all know how she feels about water) from some insults in English all strung together by their initials, making Fobogabaf. The sound of that word had sent them all laughing, especially Sherry. Even when we shortened it to ‘Fobo’ she still smiled for a long time every time she heard it.
The night ended with a lot of threats about PJ and what we’d do next time we caught him ordering anyone to kill one of us.
Seshe, who had been silent, said suddenly, “Oh, he didn’t really mean it.”
Irene made a big deal of rubbing her ears. “Funny, I thought I heard the words Kill her. Did I dream them?”
Dhana snickered.
“No,” Seshe said. “But didn’t you look at his face, the way he was watching for a shocked reaction?”
Sherry’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”
“I think he wanted us to beg for mercy, so he could grant it,” Seshe said.
Irene hooted with laughter. Diana shook her head. Faline fell on her knees and started pleading in a fake voice for mercy, and the others laughed. Seshe went on eating, calm as always, but she didn’t say anything more.
At least, not until we all parted to sleep, for we were tired after our long walking trip. I stopped her and said, “So you don’t think PJ is all that bad, is that what you mean?”
Seshe wrinkled her nose. “I think he’s horrid,” she said. “But that’s because he was raised by her. She’s got to be the worst mother ever, but he’s just a kid. What else has he known?”
I got to the uncomfortable question. “So you think I was wrong about insulting him and all that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone tells him the truth. I don’t think his mother would permit anyone around either of them who told the truth.”
I thought about that as I lay in my hammock. (We had hammocks in the Junky, which took up less room than beds.) Telling him the truth. The truth had been insulting enough; did that mean Seshe thought insults that weren’t true would be wicked? Even to creeps? Or was that acting like creeps?
Resolving to ponder this more, I drifted off to sleep.
o0o
Some days passed, during which we got a band of rain that lasted off and on the whole time. More rain, probably, than I’d ever seen in my life!
Not that I minded. Those days blended into a continual state of happiness. I worked hard at my magic and my riding during brief clear-ups in the sky, until the latter began to feel natural. Magic, alas, was not so easy.
But the first test came, and unexpectedly too.
See, we’d prided ourselves on a mission accomplished and a job well done — but I’d forgotten the parade that had caused me originally to go spy out the Auknuges. So we were all taken by surprise when Diana came running into the Junky the first day it was really clear, so spent she couldn’t talk for what must have been a full minute. And considering how fast, and how long, she could run, it meant she’d come quite a ways at top speed.
She gasped, “Clair!”
I zapped up to the White Palace, and stood for a moment recovering. When the transfer blitz wore off, I said, “We gotta get some kinda intercom.”
Clair didn’t even ask what that was. “Problem?”
“Diana.”
We went down by her transfer spell, and Diana told us in a hoarse voice that a whole slew of men were marching from Glotulae’s city straight toward the forest.
I turned to Clair, appalled. “An army? What can we do?”
Clair gave me a grim smile. “I have some spells prepared. Will you help me?”
“You bet!”
Diana led us back through the forest, where we emerged on a gentle ridge and saw them in the distance.
“Perfect,” Clair said, surveying the ground before the approaching marchers.
She vanished, and Diana and I stood in silence, me hopping from foot to foot. A minute or so passed, and a dazzle and puff of air brought Clair back again, now holding a book.
As soon as she had blinked away the transfer reaction, she opened the book to a page, showed me a spell, and murmured it, her finger under the words. I saw at once what she was doing, and did the spell myself, strengthening and speeding her work.
We pulled water from underground, and from local streams, all of it saturating the road ahead so that suddenly those marchers found themselves struggling through an increasingly murky swamp. They toiled on, until one of them took a step and splorched up to the waist in liquid brown mud. Their ranks serried, then stopped.
We waited, watching then talk, gesturing a lot, while the one fellow was pulled from the murk by a couple others — all sinking up to their shins. Another fellow was ordered to go forward, which he did slowly, tentatively, like he was barefoot and the ground as hot and tarry as the playground at my old school.
Splurp! Two steps, and he sank up to his armpits.
They pulled him out, turned around and galumphed back to the Squashed Wedding Cake. Almost immediately Clair’s and my spells disintegrated, permitting the water to filter right back to where it had been, but the retreating army never noticed.
When they were gone, we returned to the Junky and reported to the girls. We decided that we would have to spend each day in serious patrolling, at least for a while, but no one complained.
That night brought rain again. Clair and I sat on a balcony sheltered from the wind high in the White Palace, sipping hot chocolate.
I sipped cautiously, and was relieved to discover that chocolate tasted good to me again. A few days before I’d experimented with eating nothing but chocolate pie, my very favorite food. No, my favorite dessert. No one said a thing about healthy food. But after two days I felt crummy, and the sight of a pie made my guts revolt. Meanwhile, a soup Janil made smelled wonderful, and I ate two bowls, skipping dessert. In fact I’d skipp
ed having sweet stuff until then. “I wonder if Fobo is nasty because she eats so many sweets. It sure can ruin your mood.”
“I don’t know.” Clair rubbed her thumb round the rim of her cup. “But somehow I don’t think sending her a plain meal of bread-and-cheese as a hint would work.”
“No,” I agreed.
Silence, as we listened to the patter of the rain, and sipped, and then I said, “If we stay as kids — and I plan to — will we live forever?”
“No.” Clair shook her white hair back. “I researched that as much as I could. It’s sort of hard to find many records, but the few I have found make it clear that either the kids grow up eventually, and I guess die of old age — ”
“How? You go straight from being a kid to old?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what it seemed like. Or they get killed. Or vanish, like Mearsieanne.”
“Mearsieanne? You mean, your ancestor, right, not your mom?”
“Right. At least, she vanished from records.”
“Weird.”
Clair turned to me. “Soon the weather will get cold. I don’t think you have ever seen winter.”
It was just a statement, but I was getting to know Clair by now. “Something new? Oh no,” I croaked, clutched my throat, and pretended to fall off my chair. First setting down my chocolate, of course.
Clair’s eyes crinkled in mirth. “All right. I’ll stop worrying.”
“I’m not going back,” I said. “I don’t care if it snows for the next ten years. I don’t care if you decorate the palace like the Squashed Wedding Cake.” I stopped, held my nose, and then said, “Well, maybe I’d just start living in the Junky. Wow, Clair, you have to see that place.”
“I believe you.”
I snapped my fingers. “Speaking of the Junky, we need us an intercom.”
“Which is?”
“Well, on Earth, it’s a thingie connected by electricity, where you press a button and talk, and people at the other end of the house, or school, or whatever, can hear you. Faster than sending a messenger, you see? Good for emergencies.”