A brass telephone on the wall near the stove emitted a tinny jingle. Mrs Aakiuq hurried to lift the earpiece, listening very carefully to the message being relayed by her friend Mrs Umiak at the exchange. Her face broadened into a shining smile, and by the time she set the phone back on its hook and turned to her guests she could barely speak for excitement.
“Great news, my dears! The margravine is to grant you an audience! The margravine herself! She is sending her chauffeur to carry you to the Winter Palace! Such an honour! To think, you will go straight from my own humble kitchen to the margravine’s audience chamber!”
8
“ What’s a margravine?” Hester hissed at Tom, as they stepped outside again into the fierce cold. “It sounds like something you spread on your toast…”
“I suppose it’s a sort of mayoress,” Tom said.
“A margravine,” Pennyroyal chipped in, “is the female version of a margrave. A lot of these small northern cities have something similar; a hereditary ruling family, with titles handed down from one generation to the next. Margrave. Portreeve. Graf. The Elector Urbanus of Eisenstadt. The Direktor of Arkangel. They’re very keen on their traditions up here.”
“Well, I don’t see why they can’t just call her a mayoress and have done with it,” said Hester grumpily.
A bug was waiting for them at the harbour gates; an electric vehicle of the sort that Tom remembered from London, although he didn’t remember any quite as beautiful as this. It was painted bright red, with a golden letter R surrounded by curlicues on its flank. The single wheel at the back was larger than on a normal bug, and studded to grip snow. On the curving mudguards which arched above the two front wheels big electric lanterns had been mounted, and snowflakes danced crazily in their twin beams.
The chauffeur saw them coming and slid open the glastic canopy as they drew near. He wore a red uniform with gold braid and epaulettes, and when he drew himself up to his full height and saluted he just about came up to Hester’s waist. A child, she thought at first, and then saw that he was actually much older than her, with a grown man’s head balanced on a stumpy little body. She quickly looked away, realizing that she had been staring at him in exactly the same hurtful, prying, pitiful way that people sometimes stared at her.
“Name’s Smew,” he said. “Her Radiance has sent me to bring you to the Winter Palace.”
They climbed into the bug, squeezing on to the back seat on either side of Pennyroyal, who took up a surprising amount of space for a small man. Smew slid shut the lid, and they were off. Tom looked back to wave at the Aakiuqs, who were watching from a window of their house, but the air-harbour had vanished into the snow- flurries and the wintry dark. The bug was driving along a broad thoroughfare, from which covered arcades opened off on either side. Shops and restaurants and grand villas flicked by, all dead, all dark. “This is Rasmussen Prospekt,” Smew announced. “Very elegant street. Runs right through the middle of the upper city from bow to stern.”
Tom looked out through the bug’s lid. He was impressed by this beautiful, desolate place, yet the emptiness of it made him nervous. Where was it going, rushing into the dead north like this? He shivered inside his warm clothes, remembering his time aboard another town that had been in the wrong place, heading for a mysterious destination: Tunbridge Wheels, whose deranged mayor had driven it to a watery grave in the Sea of Khazak.
“Here we are,” announced Smew suddenly. “The Winter Palace; home to the House of Rasmussen for eight hundred years.”
They were nearing the city’s stern, and the bug’s electric motor griped and whinnied as it carried them up a long ramp. At the top stood the palace which Tom had glimpsed from the air the night before; a twirl of white metal with spires and balconies rimed in ice. The upper storeys looked empty and abandoned, but lights showed in some of the windows on the lower floors, and gas-flames danced in bronze tripods outside the circular front door.
The bug scrunched to a halt on the frosty drive, and Smew held the canopy while his passengers climbed out, then hurried up the palace steps and slid the outer door open, letting them into a small chamber called a heat-lock. He slid the door shut, and after a few seconds, when the cold air that had entered with the visitors had been warmed by heaters in the roof and walls, an inner door opened. They followed Smew into a panelled hallway, the walls hung with tapestries. Giant double doors loomed ahead, clad in priceless Old-Tech alloys. Smew knocked on them, then muttered, “Wait here, please,” and scurried away down a side-passage. The building creaked slightly, swaying with the motion of the city. There was a smell of mildew.
“I don’t like this,” said Hester, looking up at the thick veils of cobweb which swathed the chandeliers and dangled from the heating ducts. “Why has she asked us here? It could be a trap.”
“Stuff and nonsense, Miss Shaw,” scoffed Pennyroyal, trying not to look too alarmed by her suggestion. “A trap? Why should the margravine set a trap for us? She’s a very superior sort of person, remember, a type of mayoress.”
Hester shrugged. “I’ve only come across two mayors before, and neither of them were very superior. They were both stark, staring mad.”
The doors suddenly jerked and slid sideways, grating slightly on their bearings. Beyond them stood Smew, dressed now in a long blue robe and a six-cornered hat and clutching a staff of office twice his own height. He welcomed the guests solemnly, as if he had never seen them before, and then thumped the staff three times on the metal floor. “Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal and party,” he announced, and stepped aside to let them walk past him into the pillared space beyond.
A line of argon globes hung from the vaulted roof, each casting a circular glow on the floor beneath it, like stepping stones of light leading towards the far end of the enormous chamber. Someone sat waiting there, slouched in an ornate throne on a raised dais. Hester groped for Tom’s hand, and side by side they followed Pennyroyal through shadow and light, shadow and light, until they stood at the foot of the dais steps, looking up into the face of the margravine.
For some reason, they had both expected someone old. Everything in this silent, rusting house spoke of age and decay, of ancient customs preserved long after their purpose had been forgotten. Yet the girl gazing haughtily down at them was even younger than they were; certainly not a day over sixteen. A large, pretty girl, dressed in an elaborate ice-blue gown and a white overmantle with a fox-fur collar. Her features had something of the Inuit look of Aakiuq and his wife, but her skin was very fair and her hair was golden. The colour of autumn leaves, Hester thought, hiding her face. The margravine’s beauty made her feel small and worthless and unneeded. She started looking for faults. She’s far too fat. And her neck needs a good wash. And the moths have been at that pretty frock, and all the buttons are done up wrong…
Beside her, Tom was thinking, So young, and in charge of a whole city! No wonder she looks sad!
“Your Worship,” said Pennyroyal, bowing low. “May I say how very grateful I am for the kindness that you and your people have extended to myself and my young companions…”
“You must call me ‘Your Radiance’,” said the girl. “Or, ‘Light of the Ice Fields’.”
There was an awkward silence. Little scraping and clicking noises came from the fat heating ducts which snaked across the ceiling, warming the palace with recycled heat from the engines. The girl peered at her guests. At last she said, “If you’re Nimrod Pennyroyal, how come you’re so much fatter and balder than your picture?”
She picked up a book from a small side-table and held it out to show the back cover. It bore a painting of someone who might have been Pennyroyal’s hunkier younger brother.
“Ah, well, artistic licence, you know,” blustered the explorer. “Fool of a painter — I told him to show me as I am, paunch and high forehead and all, but you know what these artistic types are; they do love to idealize, to show the inner man…”
The margravine smiled. (She looked even prettier smiling. Hester decided that she disliked her quite a lot.) “I just wanted to be sure that it was really you, Professor Pennyroyal,” she said. “I quite understand about the portrait. I was always having to have mine done for plates and stamps and coins and things before the plague came, and they hardly ever got it right…”
She stopped talking suddenly, as if some internal nanny had reminded her that a margravine does not babble
