Scene 21: My Proposal
I made my proposal to Lord Stern. He did not like it.
“Your evidence seems flimsy,” he said.
“Your facts, what I have been able to glean from talking to an information keeper who, by the way, has been very helpful, is a very poor way to do research,” I shot back. “You want to me to find a group for which you have virtually no data. I think the Democracy of Rock and Roll is to the south and I think that would be a very good place for The Rebel Horde to hide. Besides, their rhetoric seems consistent with anti–royalist leanings and the Democracy of Rock and Roll would be a good place for them to hide out.”
“How are you going to find anyone in thousands of square miles of unmapped area?” Lord Stern asked.
“I think if I show up there, The Rebel Horde will find me,” I said.
“And if they don’t.”
“Perhaps I can find some treasure,” I said. “That might make the trip worthwhile.”
It was a smart alecky response but I was running out of patience. This whole exercise seemed pointless. I was risking my neck for very little return except Gyllian thought it would benefit the human race if I did this and I could not let the whole human race down. Maybe I had been absorbing Star Runner’s obsession with her own race.
Hollis burst through the door that I thought of as Hollis’s door.
“Lord Stern! Lord Stern!” he cried. “Hollin wants me dead.”
You, too, I thought with not much compassion.
“Calm down, Hollis,” Lord Stern said. His tone led me to think this drama had played out before.
“No, she’s serious,” Hollis said, a bit breathlessly.
The boy certainly knew how to be a drama queen.
“She says Prince Albert died and she can play the part of Queen Victoria much better if I really died. Then she would be sad and could where the widow weeds much more convincingly. She says it’s been the plan all along.”
Lord Stern looked very unhappy.
“Is that what she said to you?” he asked Hollis in a tell me the truth or else voice. I knew that tone of voice well.
“Yes,” the boy said. “She says I have to drink poison, slow-acting poison, so I’ll seem sick and then I have to die.”
“She doesn’t want you to play at dying,” Lord Stern clarified.
“No,” Hollis said. “She wants me dead. She showed me the picture of my coffin and the plans for my state funeral.”
Lord Stern wiped the sweat from his forehead.
I wondered if he had forgotten I was in the room.
Then Lord Stern turned to me.
“I’ll have everything prepared,” he said. “You may go. Teddy and Gwennore will of course accompany you. And you will take Hollis with you. I may be able to persuade Hollin to abandon her plan in the interim. Meanwhile, Hollis will be out of the Royal Precincts and away from harm.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, “under one condition.”
“Condition?” They both turned to me.
“Hollis, you have to do as I say,” I said. “This is a dangerous mission but everyone needs to understand I am in charge. I cannot have oversight if you run off and get into trouble. I may not have the resources to rescue you. We’re traveling by river. Teddy knows about that. I do not. We are in search of The Rebel Horde. They may be dangerous. We may encounter dragons and they’re dangerous, too.”
I felt absurd saying this last item. I really had a hard time believing there were dragons in those hills, but who knew.
“Dragons? Really? Will we see any of them?” Hollis was excited again. He was acting about twelve rather than being an older boy. But then Hollin was acting about ten with her crazy schemes.
“I don’t know if we will see dragons,” I said. “They may eat us before they speak to us. We need to be careful.”
“Can I really go?” Hollis turned to Lord Stern.
“Yes,” he said. The weariness of his tone suggested he was quite tired of dealing with Hollin and Hollis.
Hollis jumped up from the table. “I’ll get a few things,” he said.
“We leave in the morning,” I said.
But he had already exited through his door and was gone.
“I know his presence will be trying,” Lord Stern said. “But I have little alternative at the moment. He’s a good boy, just a bit high strung.”
“He should make an interesting contrast to Gwennore,” I remarked and got tiredly to my feet. I had a long night ahead of me. I had to scan all the flimsy sheets. Thankfully my wet wiring could analyze them through the scanner and create a useful summary for my limited storage database. I was getting an idea how limiting Captain Star Runner’s mobile memory unit was. I should have been more understanding of her when we were living in the villa. But that was long ago, or at least it seemed long ago.
“I hope this is all worth it,” I told Lord Stern.
“Me, too,” he said. “All of this,” and he gestured to the walls by which I presumed he meant to encompass all of the Royal Province of Debussy-on-La-Mer, “Is getting to be a bit too much.”
I wondered, as I made my way back to 202 Green Street, if Lord Stern and I could be friends in another circumstance. He seemed to have a good head on his shoulders.
Scene 22: On the Stairs
When I stepped onto the landing outside my door, Daniels stepped off the bottom step to the attic and stood there. The landing is narrow. It is hard for two people to stand there comfortably. He was very close. I am a former police officer. I am a tall and strong woman. His presence so close to me unnerved me. I have many male friends, but there are some men who just give me the willies. They are usually men who see women as objects. Daniels did not look at me that way. He seemed to be evaluating me in some way I could not fathom.
“Good evening, Ms. Camberwell,” he finally said before proceeding down the staircase.
He was waiting for me, I thought. Why? What reason had he to even notice me. His presence seemed like intimidation, but to what end.
I had been sailing along on adrenaline. Now I collapsed onto my bed, exhausted. I had much to do before morning.
Scene 22: Starting Out and heading Away
There are too many scenes for a movie. The Saving the Cat guy says forty, no more and no less. I haven’t bought that book to read and this is not a movie, but it is an idea which intrigues me. After ripping twenty-four discs from the latest Elizabeth George mystery, forty scenes seems like a very reasonable approach. I still cannot believe what Havers is doing. I’m acting like a six-yea-old reading that book. I cannot read the next scene because I’m scared for a fictional character. I’m not scared for my own characters. I will not do that many bad things to them. Am I doing enough bad things to Ronnie and what sort of character flaws am I showing up in this novel. At least in the first two books she was pining away for Star. She was uncertain in the first book what to do. That is sort of like this book though for a different reason. She is overwhelmed by her physical circumstances here. She knew her place on Hypatia and she does not know it here. She had a support system of sorts and she has none here. She is totally alone and although she thinks of herself as a loner, she isn’t. She is faced with the wide open areas of a whole planet while formerly she was limited to the dome over Ptolemy City with some trips outside of it.
We headed out just before dawn. A ship was to take us down the Afternoon of the Faun River to La Mer and then down the coast to the mouth of the Ruby Rock and Roll River. That part of the journey was a bit undefined as our maps were imprecise. —- mouth of the river? To go downstream we will need to find the headwaters or at least put our paddle in as it is going by.
From a suitable place on the coast, a flying machine–no kidding, that is what they are called–would take us inland to find the Ruby Rock and Roll River.
OK. They do that.
We camped alongside the Ruby Rock and Roll River that night. We would start our journey on the river in the morning. Hollis was keyed up. He chattered incessantly until Teddy threatened to beat him up if he did not stop talking. Hollis was disbelieving and outraged, but Teddy’s angry tone and aggressiveness convinced Hollis that Teddy was Sirius. Gwennore sang to herself in sounds more than words. I was just tired and anxious.
I slept poorly. In the morning we were off.
The looping nature of the Ruby Rock and Roll River had convinced me it would be difficult to navigate. However, we moved along fairly easily, the river taking us where it went. Teddy and Hollis were in one boat while Gwennore and I occupied the other. I had expected primitive means of locomotion, but these were advanced craft that basically ran themselves. We just sat there and watched the riverbanks.
it was the riverbanks which surprised Teddy and me. Hollis was excited about everything and Gwennore had her own mono log which was incoherent as far as I could tell.
What surprised Teddy and me were all the abandoned buildings along the riverbanks. We saw burned out cabins, tumbled down shacks and buildings which just had the foundations left. Every once in a while we saw the ruins of what must have been castles. The river flowed on and the evidence of former habitation continued.
It was like the ride I once went on. We were in a boat that went down a river. We saw a cabin set ablaze and underwent an attack. We saw dangerous animals come to drink at the river’s edge before we turned back. That was how Ruby Rock and Roll River was, like an amusement park ride. There were birds in the air and fish in the river. That was all the wildlife we saw. The whole area was an unfinished toy land like the ones at winter festival time back home.