Over The Sea (13 page)

On the other three sides of the parade square were streets of houses and shops, with a lot of trade-related shops. This had been the main trade town for Mearsies Heili before Glotulae and her palace guard marched in and took over.

Overall, maybe it would've been a couple hours of travel time in a car, but walking, especially around rain puddles, had taken a couple of days. Remember that, I told myself.

When we came to the city's edge we were all quiet, busy looking around. The people dressed more or less like people in MH, and they seemed ordinary enough, going about their business pretty much the way they did on the cloudtop, though the people on the cloud top looked happier — that is, on the cloud top you don't have to watch all the time to make sure you aren't getting in the way of someone with higher rank.

The buildings were much like those elsewhere in Mearsies Heili — made mostly of stone, with steep roofs and lots of windows that could be shuttered in winter. But where the other Mearsiean houses always had window boxes and the walls whitewashed or painted other colors, these were plain and bare on the outside. I soon found out that was because the Auknuges actually had laws against decoration. They liked all the difference of rank preserved, and nothing made Glotulae angrier than “inferiors” trying to look nice, or pretty up a house, or forgetting to bow and get out of the way when their “betters” sashayed along.

We kept going past people, all of them busy until a beribboned aristocrat walked or rode by and then everyone got hastily out of the way, while bowing or curtseying to various degrees. Even kids!

We saw the Squashed Wedding Cake in the middle of the town — and there was all the decoration that everyone else in the city ought to have had. And I mean
all
. Fake spires attached to towers, statues and curlicues and tiles and every other kind of fancy thing people have dreamed up to make buildings look more imposing were festooned, plastered, glittered, and piled onto every surface of the palace. On one side there was scaffolding indicating more building going on — golden statues of crowned heads being placed on some of the spires. (We found out that these were replicas of PJ and his mother.)

We stood in the big square before it, through which people moved in various directions toward the streets connecting the other three sides. All the streets opened onto it, but there were no ugly shops to offend the royal eyes. The houses at the ends of each street were large in a modest way — that was where Glotulae's court lived. The shops were farther down each street, and of course all along the outskirts of the city.

So this was the building I'd seen from my window — and I turned, lifting my eyes above the rooftops to see the mountain all purply from haze, its top hidden by fleecy white cloud. From this angle, all of the white castle that was visible were the topmost towers, glistening like pearl against the sky.

Just seeing it made my heart fazoom with joy. Home!

“Look out, you fool!”

I hadn't been paying attention to anyone around me. The voice shrieking — a voice that somehow managed to be both whiny and arrogant — and the clatter of horse hooves, then a huge crash, all took me by surprise. I whirled around. Not twenty-five steps away a wagon filled with crockery had just overturned, the two horses plunging and panicking in their traces. An older man, his face white and eyes stark, stared up at a beribboned figure on the back of another horse.

PJ!

“Oh, no.” Seshe looked shocked.

“You dolt!” PJ shouted at the man. “Do you think a year in prison might make you quicker?”

“What happened?” I murmured.

“That loaded cart didn't get out of His Pimpleship's way fast enough,” Irene said grimly.

I realized that we stood there alone, like trees amid a field of wind-bent wheat: all the people nearby had stopped walking, talking, riding, carrying, and bowed low. The cart driver was trying to bow and to control his panicking horses at the same time. Diana flickered a dark-eyed look my way, and then sprang to help. At her touch, the nearer one stopped plunging quite so hard. Seshe also moved to help, murmuring in a low voice to the nervous animals.

PJ glared around, then saw us. “Bend your knee!” he shouted.

I looked at that ruined crockery, the frightened man and his spooked horses, and anger burned through me. Crossing my arms, I snarled, “Not to a knucklehead like you!”

PJ gaped. Had anyone ever defied him before?

“Look at that mess you caused.” I pointed at the spilled cart. “
Anyone
but a sniffle-brained crabwit would see that the cart couldn't turn aside as fast as you were galloping.”

I couldn't see any faces because everyone was still bowing, but over the sound of the horses and the disjointed apologies of the carter driver, I distinctly heard a snicker from someone in the crowd.

No doubt PJ did as well.

“Guard!” PJ shrieked, a shaking finger (with two rings on it) pointing at me.

Some tall fellows in yellow, pink, and orange livery came running up, all of them toting halberds.

“Arrest her for insolence!”

“And arrest him for stupidity while you're at it,” I yelled, too mad to think. “Also for wearing the silliest clothes ever seen!”

Hands clamped on my arms. The other girls looked at one another, Faline covering her crimson face, Dhana with her lip curled. When a great big red-haired guard (the rest were looking at one another for clues pretty much like the girls were doing) reached sort of tentatively for Irene, she backed up, nose in the air, and shouted, “Leave me be!
I
am with the
princess
!”

She pointed at me. All the faces swung my way — the bowing ones looking sidewise.

The two holding me let go as if their fingers had burned, and I thought crazily
, Oh yeah, that's me!
“I,” I announced, “am Princess Cherene Jennet Sherwood of Mearsies Heili!”

PJ gawked. Then he sneered. “I don't believe it. That stupid white-haired girl doesn't have any sisters.”

“I don't care what you believe,” I snarled back, feeling more strongly by the moment that I'd managed to cause what would end up being a nasty disaster. “It's true, and if you like we can go right to the cloudtop and you can ask Clair yourself.”

At the word
cloudtop
furtive whispers went through the crowd, though no one said anything loud enough to hear.

PJ looked around, his face pruning up. “We'll go talk to my mother.
She
is the
queen
.”

“Not of Mearsies Heili, she's not,” I said. “If you call an interloper queen of a small town, well, then so it is — ”

“You can't say that!” PJ bellowed.

“I just did! Furthermore — ”

“We will conduct these persons to her majesty.”

This was a new voice. Everyone turned to see a short, fat man dressed in gray except for a heavy beaten gold chain of office round his shoulders. He bowed most unctuously to PJ, and gestured for more of those tall fellows with the halberds. All of a sudden there were quite a few of them. They loomed around PJ and us girls, forcing the crowd back.

“The rest of you, unless you wish an interview with the queen, I suggest you disperse,” he invited.

And almost as quickly as the guards had come the crowd sort of milled about and then was gone. Paying no attention to any of them, the man in gray walked toward the Squashed Wedding Cake, and perforce the rest of us had to go as well.

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.