Dangerous Women (11 page)

“Hey! You girls!”

Alais shrieked and ran. Nora wheeled, knowing that voice, and looked up into Richard’s merry eyes.

“Share those?”

They went into the garden and sat on a bench by the wall, and ate the buns. Richard licked the sweet dust from his fingers.

“Nora, I’m going away.”

“Away,” she said, startled. “Where?”

“Mama wants me to go find Boy and Geoffrey. I think she’s just getting me away from Papa. Then I’m going to look for some knights to follow me. I’m duke now, I need an army.” He hugged her, laid his cheek against her hair. “I’ll be back.”

“You’re so lucky,” she burst out. “To be duke. I’m nobody! Why am I a girl?”

He laughed, his arm warm around her, his cheek against her hair. “You won’t always be a little girl. You’ll marry someday, and then you’ll be a queen, like Mama, or at least a princess. I heard them say they want you to marry somebody in Castile.”

“Castile. Where’s that?” A twinge of alarm went through her. She looked up into his face. She thought that nobody was as handsome as Richard.

“Somewhere in the Spanish Marches.” He reached for the last of the buns, and she caught his hand and held on. His fingers were all sticky.

“I don’t want to go away,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I won’t know anybody.”

“You won’t go for a while. Castile—that means castles. They fight the Moors down there. You’ll be a Crusader.”

She frowned, puzzled. “In Jerusalem?” In the convent, they had always been praying for the Crusade. Jerusalem was on the other side of the world, and she had never heard it called Castile.

“No, there’s a Crusade in Spain too. El Cid, you know, and Roland. Like them.”

“Roland,” she said, with a leap of excitement. There was a song about Roland, full of thrilling passages. She tilted her face toward him again. “Will I have a sword?”

“Maybe.” He kissed her hair again. “Women don’t usually need swords. I have to go. I just wanted to say good-bye. You’re the oldest one left at home now, so take care of Johanna.”

“And Alais,” she said.

“Oh, Alais,” he said. He took her hand. “Nora, listen, something is going on between Mama and Papa, I don’t know what, but something. Be brave, Nora. Brave and good.” His arm tightened a moment and then he stood and walked away.

“When will we be in Poitiers?” Alais said happily. She sat on a chest in the back of the wagon and spread her skirts out.

Nora shrugged. The carts went very slowly and would make the journey much longer. She wished they would let her ride a horse. Her nurse climbed in over the wagon’s front, turned, and lifted Johanna after her. The drover led the team up, the reins bunched in his hands, turned the horses’ rumps to the cart, and backed them into the shafts. Maybe he would let her hold the reins. She hung over the edge of the wagon, looking around at the courtyard, full of other wagons, people packing up her mother’s goods, a line of saddled horses waiting.

The nurse said, “Lady Nora, sit down.”

Nora kept her back to her, to show she didn’t hear. Her mother had come out of the hall door, and at the sight of her everybody else in the whole courtyard turned toward her as if she were the sun; everybody warmed in that light. Nora called, “Mama!” and waved, and her mother waved back.

“Lady Nora! Sit!”

She leaned on the side of the wagon. Beside her, Alais giggled and poked her with her elbow. A groom was bringing the Queen’s horse; she waved away someone waiting to help her and mounted by herself. Nora watched how she did that, how she kept her skirts over her legs but got her legs across the saddle anyway. Her Mama rode like a man. She would ride like that. Then, from the gate, a yell went up.

“The King!”

Alais on the chest twisted around to look. Nora straightened. Her father on his big black horse was riding in the gate, a line of knights behind him, mailed and armed. She looked for Richard, but he wasn’t with them. Most of the knights had to stay outside the wall because there was no room in the yard.

Eleanor reined her horse around, coming up beside the wagon, close enough that Nora could have reached out and touched her. The horse sidestepped, tossing its head up. His face dark, the King forced his way through the crowd toward her.

She said, “My lord, what is this?”

He threw one wide look all around the courtyard. His face was blurry with beard and his eyes were rimmed in red. Nora sat quickly down on the chest. Her father spurred his horse up head to tail with her mother’s.

“Where are my sons?”

“My lord, I have no notion, really.”

He stared at her, furious. “Then I’ll take hostages.” He twisted in his saddle, looking back toward his men. “Get these girls!”

Nora shot to her feet again. “No,” the Queen said, forcing her way between him and the wagon, almost nose to nose with him, her fist clenched. “Keep your hands off my daughters.” Alais reached out and gripped Nora’s skirt in her fist.

He thrust his face at her. “Try to stop me, Eleanor!”

“Papa, wait.” Nora leaned over the side of the wagon. “We want to go to Poitiers.”

The King said evilly, “What
you
want.” Two men had dismounted, were coming briskly toward the wagon. He never took his gaze off her mother.

The Queen’s horse bounded up between the men and the cart. Leaning closer to the King, she spoke in a quick low voice. “Don’t be foolish, my lord, on such a small matter. If you push this too hastily, you will never get them back. Alais has that handsome dowry; take her.”

“Mama, no!” Nora stretched her arm out. Alais flung her arms around her waist.

“Please—please—”

The Queen never even looked at them. “Be still, Nora. I will deal with this.”

“Mama!” Nora tried to catch hold of her, to make her turn and look. “You promised. Mama, you promised she would come with us!” Her fingers grazed the smooth fabric of her mother’s sleeve.

Eleanor struck at her, hard, knocking her down inside the wagon. Alais gave a sob. The King’s men were coming on again, climbing up toward them. Nora lunged at them, her fists raised.

“Get away! Don’t you dare touch her!”

From behind, someone got hold of her and dragged her out of the way. The two men scrambled up over the side of the wagon and fastened on the little French princess. They were dragging her up over the side. She cried out once and then was limp, helpless in their arms. Nora wrenched at the arm around her waist, and only then she saw it was her mother holding her.

“Mama!” She twisted toward Eleanor. “You promised. She doesn’t want to go.”

Eleanor thrust her face down toward Nora’s. “Be still, girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Behind her, the King was swinging his horse away. “You can keep that one. Maybe she’ll poison you.” He rode off after his men, who had Alais clutched in their grip. Other men were lifting out Alais’ baggage. They were hauling her off like baggage. Nora gave a wordless cry. With a sharp command, her father led his men on out the gate again, taking Alais like a trophy.

Her arm still around Nora’s waist, Eleanor was scowling after the King. Nora wrenched herself free and her mother turned to face her.

“Well, now, Nora. That was unseemly, wasn’t it.”

“Why did you do that, Mama?” Nora’s voice rang out, high-pitched and furious, careless who heard.

“Come, girl,” her mother said, and gave her a shake. “Settle yourself. You don’t understand.”

With a violent jerk of her whole body, Nora wrenched away from her mother. “You said Alais could come.” Something deep and hard was gathering in her, as if she had swallowed a stone. She began to cry. “Mama, why did you lie to me?”

Her mother blinked at her, her forehead crumpled. “I can’t do everything.” She held out her hand, as if asking for something. “Come, be reasonable. Do you want to be like your father?”

Tears were squirting from Nora’s eyes. “No, and not like
you,
either, Mama. You promised me, and you lied.” She knocked aside the outstretched hand.

Eleanor recoiled; her arm rose and she slapped Nora across the face. “Cruel, ungrateful child!”

Nora sat down hard. She poked her fists into her lap, her shoulders hunched. Alais was gone; she couldn’t save her after all. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t really liked Alais much. She wanted to be a hero, but she was just a little girl, and nobody cared. She turned to the chest and folded her arms on it, put her head down, and wept.

Later, she leaned up against the side of the wagon, looking down the road ahead.

She felt stupid. Alais was right: she couldn’t be a king, and now she couldn’t even be a hero.

The nurses were dozing in the back of the wagon. Her mother had taken Johanna away to ride on her saddle in front of her, to show Nora how bad she had been. The drover on his bench had his back to her. She felt as if nobody could see her, as if she weren’t even there.

She didn’t want to be a king anyway if it meant being mean and yelling and carrying people off by force. She wanted to be like her mother, but her
old
mother, the good mother, not this new one, who lied and broke promises, who hit and called names. Alais had said, “Your mother is wicked,” and she almost cried again, because it was true.

She would tell Richard when he came back. But then in her stomach something tightened like a knot:
if
he came back. Somehow the whole world had changed. Maybe even Richard would be false now.

“You’ll be a Crusader,” he had said to her.

She didn’t know if she wanted that. Being a Crusader meant going a long, long way and then dying. “Be good,” Richard had said. “Be brave.” But she was just a little girl. Under the whole broad blue sky, she was just a speck.

The wagon jolted along the road, part of the long train of freight heading down toward Poitiers. She looked all around her, at the servants walking along among the carts, the bobbing heads of horses and mules, the heaps of baggage lashed on with rope. Her mother was paying no heed to her, had gone off ahead, in the mob of riders leading the way. The nurses were sleeping. Nobody was watching her.

Nobody cared about her anymore. She waited to disappear. But she didn’t.

She stood, holding on to the side to keep from falling. Carefully, she climbed up over the front of the wagon onto the bench, keeping her skirts over her legs, and sat down next to the drover, who gawked down at her, a broad, brown face in a shag of beard.

“Now, my little lady—”

She straightened her skirts, planted her feet firmly on the kickboard, and looked up at him. “Can I hold the reins?” she said.

A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for television shows such as
Profiler
and
Star Trek: The Next Generation
(for which she was also a story editor for several years), a number of popular SF novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Card series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include
Circuit,
Circuit Breaker,
Final Circuit,
The Edge of Reason,
Runespear
(with Victor Milán),
High Stakes,
Santa Fe,
and
Queen’s Gambit Declined
. Her most recent novel is
The Edge of Ruin,
the sequel to
The Edge of Reason
. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel
Double Solitaire
and the Star Trek novel
The Tears of the Singers
. She’s also the editor of the anthology
A Very Large Array
. She lives in New Mexico.

Here she takes us to a distant planet to show us that even in a society where spaceships thunder through the night and aliens mingle with humans on crowded city streets, some of the games you might run into go
way
back.

Glass met glass with dull, tuneless clunks as the human bartender filled orders. A Hajin waitress with a long and tangled red mane running down her bare back clicked on delicate hooves through the bar delivering drinks. The patrons were a surly lot, mere shadows huddled in the dark dive, and carefully seated at tables well away from each other. No one talked. Substituting for conversation were commentators calling the action of a soccer game playing on the wall screen over the bar. Even those voices were growling rumbles because the sound was turned down so low. The odors of spilled beer and rancid cooking oil twisted through the smoke, but they and the tobacco smells were trumped by the scents of despair and simmering anger.

This dank hole was a perfect match for Second Lieutenant Tracy Belmanor’s mood. He had picked it because it was well away from the spaceport and he was unlikely to meet any of his shipmates. He should have been happy. He had graduated from the Solar League’s military academy only last month and had been assigned to his first posting. Problem was, his fellow classmates had walked out as newly minted first lieutenants, but such was not the case for the lowborn tailor’s son who had attended the academy on a scholarship. When he had received his insignia, he’d stared down at the stars and single bar and realized that he was one rung below his aristocratic classmates, even though his grades had been better, his performance in flight the equal of any of them save Mercedes, whose reflexes and ability to withstand high gee had put them all to shame. When he’d looked up at the commandant of the High Ground, Vice Admiral Sergei Arrington Vasquez y Markov, the big man had casually delivered the explanation, totally unaware how insulting it had been.

“You must understand, Belmanor, it wouldn’t do for you to be in the position of issuing orders to your classmates, especially to the Infanta Mercedes. This way you will never hold the bridge solo, and so be spared the embarrassment.”

The implication that
he
would be embarrassed to issue an order to highborn assholes, including the Emperor’s daughter, had ignited his too-quick temper.
“I’m sure that will be a great comfort to me as I’m dying because one of those idiots wrecked the ship.”
But of course he hadn’t said that. The unwary words had been at the edge of his teeth, but after four years being drilled in protocol and the chain of command, he managed to swallow the angry retort. Instead he had saluted and managed a simple “Yes, sir.” At least he hadn’t thanked Markov for the insult.