The Year of the Dead Rose by Rachel Parsons	Table of Contents Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 appear in this issue.
Chapter 8

Queen Branwen was pacing. Up and down the tiled floor of her antechamber, watching the suns dance their glare on the plants that lined her sill, she paced. She paced past her leather chair, past the cushion that would be the rest spot of those who sought her favors, past the porcelain elephants that ringed the room. She was immaculately dressed in a black gown and veil, but she somehow managed to make it look like it was being modeled by a glamour wench and not by a newly anointed monarch in mourning for her dear, departed father.

Someone who would still be alive, if he had not willfully called for the medicine men of New Prydain, and instead had summoned the physicians from the stars. Triad fever, those men declared, was curable. It required taking the blood out of the body and replacing it with some concoction they had brewed in their weird factories, but it could have saved her father’s life.

She hated the men from the stars. She knew all too well why father had not summoned them; their help always came tagged. The men from the old world wanted an end to slavery and in its stead, they would give the people of New Prydain machines. They said they had machines that could do up to the work of seventy slaves. Machines that washed, that pressed, that entertained, that kept one’s dwelling safe. Machines that heated you, that cooled you, that would fan you. Machines that a woman could use to replace a man. Machines. Machines. Machines.

But machines depended on scouring the earth, and on the domination of these offworlders, and Branwen hated them for it. Hated them for letting her father die; hated them for what they would have done to keep him alive.

“Your audience is here, madam,” A girl, naked and bronzed, with her black hair down to her buttocks, said this in a voice not obsequious enough. Branwen, six feet tall, blonde, blue eyed and vastly gorgeous, had been slumping by her leather chair. She stood up to her full height, did a single point and kicked the nude woman in the belly. The slave bowed, clutching her stomach, and stepped out backwards, looking with fear at her mistress. Branwen instantly forgot the incident.

James Connell, handsome, rugged, but not Branwen’s type, came swishing in his floor length tunic. He bowed. He did not take off his war belt, as the men of New Prydain, being ‘civilized’ did not wear them. He did not kneel. He shook the queen’s hand as if she were a merchant and they had just cut a deal.

“Read this, James.” She handed the fine parchment to her minister, with its dye-like ink and beautiful penmanship.

He knit his brows as he read it. “The date... how did it arrive so fast?”

“Ne’er you mind.” Branwen was privy to the secrets of New Fairy; she had a hard time believing in all of them, and thought her sister monarch beset with humors of the brain when she admitted that she did wholeheartedly. But she knew about dragons, knew that Rhiannon often used them to expedite letters between them and knew how to hide the great beasts from the eyes of the men of New Prydain, who would like to place each they found in a circus. Or worse: a slaughter house.

Connell’s brows were furrowing, making her fear they would knit together permanently. “She asks for me, your majesty. I do not understand.”

“You need to understand my sister monarch, James. She is asking me for support of the soul; she wants to make some kind of arrangement with you.”

He shook his head. “What kind of arrangement?”

“I am informed — do not ask how — that Heveydd is not long for this world. Or if he does survive, he will be inflamed in his cerebral cortex.” Branwen prided herself on knowing physic, and had attended the university in New Prydain, the one that is world renown. This in itself might explain her skepticism of all things unseen that lurk in the hinterlands. She also prided herself on knowing everything that went on in all the five kingdoms, and some say, beyond. Her agents even reached to the old world, it was rumored.

“How can those, what do they call their physicians there — Meddygon — be so sure?” He barely kept his contempt for the state of barbarian medicine in the big, sprawling kingdom to their east, beset by strange flows and climate. He picked up one of the lesser porcelain figures and stared at it, as if he could not contemplate what it was doing in his hand.

“I can be sure. The palace is alive with the belief that Rhiannon is poisoning Heveydd. And that, because of his infirmity, the barons and burghers, even the yeomen, are turning to her, if only as a figurehead, to launch this war.”

“A war with the offworlders? That is insane.” Putting the doll down, Connell paced in front of his sovereign. She had the title, he had the power; but he nonetheless was deferential to her. She liked it and when Branwen was happy, those who lived in her household were happy.

“They don’t see it that way. They see it as a war to avenge her disgrace.”

“Disgrace? That she was a prostitute? That was Heveydd’s doing. He failed to rescue her, even though he knew of her plight.”

“I think it’s because she is naked.”

“Aye, and what is the purpose of that?” Connell did not understand barbarians very well, much less their women, but he knew one thing: barbarian women did not go naked. Ever. Not even in front of their husbands, he supposed. That would certainly explain the men’s dour visages.

“She believes she is cursed by a powerful witch and that her kingdom would perish; even I would perish, if she but became modest.”

Connell rolled his eyes. “I swear, if we didn’t depend on those barbarians for our food and fabric, I would have no truck with them. A witch’s curse.” He all but said ‘phooey,’ but was far too polite to swear in front of the queen.

Branwen smiled thinly. “Just remember, James, although she will go about in the way you like your women, she is not to be touched.”

“That should be my advice to you, your majesty.”

Branwen stiffened. “I do not understand your meaning, Mr. Connell,” she said roughly.

“Oh, I think you do,” he said but did not elaborate. “When do we take this journey in support of the next queen of New Fairy?”

“Two days hence. I trust that will give you time to prepare yourself.”

“If one can ever be prepared for a trek to the hinterlands, madam. But aye, that should give me time.”

James Connell exited his queen’s chambers and his sandaled feet did a tattoo on the marbled floor of the palace. He took the stairs from the reception area two at a time, down to the quad that housed the palace, the Senate, and the baths, and motivated down into the town itself. He went alone, but kept his hand very close to the knife that he had tied around his right leg, as he, obviously rich and upper class, could easily be the target of cutthroats, pickpockets, kidnappers, and ruffians of all sorts.

He moved at a quick pace several blocks from the hilly area where the citizens who ruled the kingdom dwelled into what for him was a slum. But it was really a solidly middle-class area, as the apartments all had cauldrons, with wood and coal to heat them, each had a wood burning stove to keep its residents warm and with cooked food, each had pipes running water from viaducts and flowing waste out of the city, and each had its own gendarme to serve and protect.

Connell ducked to an alley way and fixed himself to a wall. It was a nasty corridor; garbage and feces lay in wait. A bat squeaked. He stared at it as it turned its leathery wings into the shape of a cowled man.

“You will burst my heart with such appearances, man,” Connell cried.

“It is but a trick of your own mind. I was here all the time, waiting for you. Waiting is such a tedious business.”

“Well, if waiting is so tedious, let us wait no more. You made the commission?”

The cowled man nodded.

“When can we expect delivery?”

The illusionist shrugged. “There is no certainty the scroll even exists. When Queen Modron was laid to rest, after her poisoning, men of all sorts scoured Caer Rhiannon. There was no refuge for an ancient scroll that was unturned.”

“Well, if we can tell that it doesn’t exist with certainty, that too would be well,” Connell said, mopping his brown with a doily that he kept in his left pocket. His nose twitched from the offal that surrounded him.

“What is in that parchment that it is so important that to have it and to not have it is the same?”

“Only the certainty of war, my friend. Only that.”

“War is always certain,” said the cowled man. “What is not certain is when and who will be doing the fighting.” With that he turned once more into a leathery, winged thing and vanished.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2007 by Rachel Parsons