The Business

'Do you yet know how long you will be staying with us, Ms Telman?' Langtuhn shouted back.

'I'm still not sure.  Probably just a few days.'

'Only a few days?'

'Yes.'

'Oh dear!  But then you might not meet the Prince.'

'Really?  Oh, what a shame.  Why?  When is he due back?'

'Not for a week or thereabouts, I am told.'

'Oh, well, not to worry, eh?'

'He will be most disappointed, I'm sure.'

'Really.'

'You cannot stay any longer?'

'I doubt it.'

'That is a shame.  I suspect he cannot come home any earlier.  He has been away on business, looking after all our interests.'

'Has he, now?'

'Yes.  I understand he has said that soon we may all start to benefit from greater outside investment.  That will be good, will it not?'

'I dare say.'

'Though of course, he is in Paris, or some such French place.  We must hope he does not gamble it all away!'

'Is the Prince a gambler?' I asked.  I'd watched him at the blackjack table in Blysecrag; if he was a gambler he wasn't a very good one.

'Oh, no,' Langtuhn said, and took both hands off the steering wheel to wave them as he looked back at me. 'I was making a joke.  Our Prince enjoys himself, but he is most responsible.'

'Yes.  Good.'

I sat back in my seat.  Well, not a despot, then.

The road grew tired with making wild zigzags up an increasingly steep slope and struck out ambitiously along a notch cut in a vertical cliff.  A hundred metres below, the river lay frozen in the bottom of the gorge like a giant icicle fallen and shattered amongst the sharp black rocks.

Langtuhn didn't seem to have noticed the transition from a steep-but-ordinary road to a slot-in-a-cliff.  He kept trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. 'We have been hoping that one day the Prince would come back from Paris with a lady who might become his new wife,' he told me.

'No luck yet?' I looked away, hoping this might encourage him to return his attention to the business of keeping the car on the narrow road.  The view down into the chasm was not an encouraging one.

'None whatsoever.  There was a princess from Bhutan he seemed most sweet upon a few years ago, they say, but she married a tax-consulting gentleman from Los Angeles, USA.'

'Smart girl.'

'Oh, I do not think so.  She could have been a queen.'

'Hmm.' I rubbed the red tip of my nose with one gloved hand. and looked in my guidebook for the word for frostbite.

The old palace canted out over a deep, ice-choked gorge a mile down from the glacier foot, its haphazard jumble of off-white, black-windowed buildings supported from beneath by a half-dozen enormous charcoal-dark timbers, each the size of a giant redwood.  Together they splayed out from a single jagged spur of rock far below, so that the whole ramshackle edifice looked like a pile of ivory dice clutched in a gigantic ebony hand.

This was where the dowager Queen lived, the Prince's mother.  Even higher up the mountainside, at the head of tumultuously zigzag paths, monasteries lay straggled across the precipitous slopes in long, encrusted lines of brightly painted buildings.  We passed a few groups of saffron-robed monks on the road; they stopped and looked at the car.  Some bowed, and I bowed back.

Langtuhn parked the car in a dusty courtyard; a couple of small Thulahnese ladies-in-waiting in dramatic carmine robes met us at the doors and led us into the dark spaces of the palace, through clouds of incense, to the old throne room.

'You will remember to address the Queen as ma'am, or Your Royal Highness, won't you?' Langtuhn whispered to me, as we approached.

'Don't worry.'

Guarding the doors was a massively rotund Chinese man, who wore camouflaged black/grey/white army fatigues and a jacket made of what looked like yak fur.  He was sitting in a chair reading a manga comic when we approached.  He looked up and rose carefully, taking a pair of minuscule glasses off his nose and leaving the comic open on his seat.

'This is Mihu,' Langtuhn whispered to me, 'the Queen's manservant.  Chinese.  Very devoted.'

Mihu moved in front of the double doors, barring the way to the Queen's chamber.  The two ladies-in-waiting bowed and spoke to him in slower-than-normal Thulahnese while gesturing at me.  He nodded and opened the doors.

Langtuhn had to stay in the antechamber with the two ladies.  Mihu came into the room with me and stood with his back to the door.  I looked around.

I hadn't really believed that the dowager Queen had stayed in bed for the last two and a half decades, since the death of her husband but, then, I hadn't seen the bed.

The ceiling of the huge state room was painted like the night sky.  Its two longer walls were lined by bizarrely proportioned sculptures of snarling warriors, two storeys tall.  These were covered in gold leaf, which had started to peel so that the soot-black wood underneath showed through like dense sable skin under flimsy gold armour.  Tissue-light, the strips and tatters of glittering leaf waved in the faint draughts that swirled through the vast room, setting up a strange, half-heard rustling, as though hidden legions of mice were all crumpling Lilliputian sweet-wrappers at once.  Snow-white daylight spilled in from the wall of windows, which looked across a terrace to the valley; its glare glittered back from the rustling scraps of gold like ten thousand cold and tiny flames spread out across the walls.

The bed sat in the centre; a painted wooden construction for which the term four-poster was entirely inadequate.  I had seen houses smaller than this.  It took three tall steps just to get level with the base.  From there more steps led up through lush velvet drapes and heavy brocade hangings to the surface of the bed, while from the cantilevered canopy a network of dyed ropes and loops of printed silk hung like a profusion of jungle creepers.  Big bed, big bedspread: a vast embroidered purple cover stretched from each corner and edge of the bed, rising like a perfect Mount Fuji of lilac to its central summit, where the Queen Mother's head — pale and surrounded by ringlets of white hair — stuck out of a hole in the middle like a snowy summit.  From the angle of her head it was hard to tell whether she was lying, sitting or standing.  I imagined it was perfectly possible to do all three in there.

According to Langtuhn the Queen Mother didn't even have to stay inside if she didn't want to, The whole bed was mounted on trolley wheels running on rails leading to the tall, wide set of double doors set in the west-facing wall of windows, beyond which lay the wide balcony with the view over the valley below.  Trundling the whole apparatus out to the sunlight would be a task for Mihu, I imagined.  With the bed out there and the bed's canopy rolled back, the old lady could get a breath of fresh air and take the sun.

There was nowhere to sit, so I stood facing the foot of the bed.

The little snowball head, about a metre higher than me in the centre of the bed, spoke. 'Miss Telman?' Her voice was thin but still strong.  The Queen Mother spoke excellent English, because she was.  She had been the Honourable Lady Audrey Illsey until she'd married the late King in 1949.

'Ms, yes, ma'am.'

'What?'

'I prefer the title Ms rather than Miss, Your Highness.'

'Are you married?'

'No, ma—'

'Then you are a Miss, I think.'

'Well,' I said, wishing now that for once I had shut the hell up about the Ms/Miss thing, 'there's been a change in the way people relate to each other, Your Highness.  In my generation, some of us decided to take the title Ms, as a direct equivalent of Mr, to —'