The Slum Queen Read online

  Already, he’s forgotten. Your Majesty. Already, the formalities are back like an unwanted crop of warts. Your Majesty … The poisoned titles, the cloying fragrance of Queenship … Your Majesty …

  “You can leave.”

  His face collapses, the way a scolded puppy’s collapses. “I’m … I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. Your Majesty … I … I will wash your floors for you. I can do that, please. I’ll do it free. I … I can even trim the trees in the Lord’s Garden, or, or, or in your private garden—if you have one. I didn’t see much green here in Cloud Keep, but … or hey, hey, I can clean the windows here in Cloud Tower, or, or … I’d clean every step if you so commanded. Your Majesty, I …”

  “You can leave,” she repeats.

  In the space of one very, very long minute, the man is standing at the door. The gorgeous man and all his sweaty muscles. He hasn’t even bothered to collect back his clothes; only his boots remain on his feet.

  “Your Majesty, I … I’m …”

  “When you collect your payment,” says the Queen, drawing the silks back around her waist, tying, fussing with them, “I will ensure you’re paid double what you’re due.” Her eyes meet his one last time. “Now, go.” She hasn’t even the courtesy of releasing him from her ‘love’, if she can so dignify it with the word.

  “Yes, okay, of course,” he says, near to breaking tears. “I will go, if I must, if I absolutely must.” Oh, such anguish, such torture … But no matter how many men she’s done this very same thing to, no matter how many men into whom she’s planted her own synthetic agony, it won’t be enough. Not until the whole of Atlas feels her desolation, her solitude, her unquenchable sickness … Not until she’s populated the legions-deep caverns of her own despair with all the love-starved souls of the city, no matter how artificial, this scene of hers will know no end.

  And for every time the sun sets, a new man is at her door.

  With a soft knock, the great scene begins again and again. “In,” says the Queen, and in strolls another beautiful man, another wash of hair, another scent.

  To the bed, another pair of reluctant eyes, another flexing bit of meat, another payment clad in sexy clothes and seasoned with desperation.

  She may be no real “Truth-Seer” as the slums may think, as her advisors may think, as the three Marshals and every single privileged citizen of the Lifted City rightfully believe … but she knows a horny man when she sees one. She knows the look in an eye waiting not for her affection, but for the fat meal their wallet will afterward consume. She can get any man hard in her smooth-as-milk palm, sweat or no, but none of them will look in her eyes and see truth.

  “You madly love your Queen, don’t you?” she whispers.

  Yes, they always say. Oh, yes, yes … please, please, please. Thanks to her Legacy, to her power of bending the will of man, they all believe without a doubt the web of love spun over their eyes. Please, please, please, yes, they all beg.

  “You can leave,” she says.

  The grey-bleak coldness of the balcony every morning as the arrogant sun swallows her glorious cloak of night, it’s become something of a bittersweet friend. When she lets the cool air grab at her naked body, tickling her, she can’t bring herself to giggle. Are you him? She asks this every time as well, of every beautiful man that comes through those doors.

  Another light knock. “In,” she announces, as if addressing her court.

  Every boy that has ascended the steel steps of Cloud Tower, who breathes the metallic air of the highest building in all of Atlas, the highest building even in the Lifted City that still cannot catch a view over the brim of the Wall to the oblivion beyond, every boy that passes through the security systems, the keypads, admitted by guards who don’t smile and men in thick gear who stiffly move … every boy is Chole. She turns, Queen of Atlas and powerful over all, turns to lay her eyes on the next man who enters her chambers. It is Chole, every single one of them.

  Even when his hair is bright blonde and his broad muscular figure all wrong, she still wonders if perhaps it is Chole in disguise. As he takes a seat on her feathered bed, the bird in a cage, she presses herself against the new man, the toy, the rented plaything. Are you him? Only when the man speaks does doubt finally bite her, and the more he speaks, the more doubt eats until it becomes bloated and heavy. By the time she’s removed all his clothes, by the time he’s naked with no secrets left, only then is her hope consumed.

  “You can leave.”

  The Good Queen

  A good Queen doesn’t live her whole reign in the private chambers at the Cloud Tower’s highest; she also spends time in the throne room and in the Crystal Court of the Lifted City where speeches, plans, announcements and other calls of duty and obligation are broadcast to the whole citizenry of Atlas—to all the slums, the eleven wards and the Lifted City alike. Now and then, she has to smile at her people, the greatest lie of all, donning the mask of pride and joy, and with a wave of her little hand she wishes the people’s troubles away, promising happiness for all. I’m a decent Queen, no matter what they call me behind my back.

  Sometimes when she’s addressing her people, with all the cameras and the lights pressed to her face, she wishes her Legacy could extend through the screens of the city. Is it so greedy to imagine the power she’d have simply to stare through the screen and see every single soul in all of Atlas, every will, every choice, every belief she could bend … and bend them? Every single man, woman, and child would love her. Everyone in the world would know her deep and endless suffering. And still …

  And still … it wouldn’t be enough.

  There’s a light knock at the chamber door. She ignores it because tonight she isn’t ready, and until she’s ready, the new man won’t come … If there’s any solace in being Queen, it is that the world waits for her. And that world can wait as long as time itself, she thinks to herself.

  It can wait and wait and wait.

  “Queen,” says the voice somberly on the other side of the door. “It is Janlord. Please admit me, Queen Attie, as I’ve a pressing bit of news.”

  “In,” she says, quiet as the breeze at her window, and the Marshal of Peace enters her chambers. Janlord by name, the Marshal of Peace has the duty of overseeing the status of the people of Atlas and ensuring, beyond all reasonable doubts, that the citizenry is in a happy state of living. His post is supported by another Marshal: The Marshal of Order, who watchdogs the streets and rids it of crime through the utilization of his police force called Guardian. There is also the Marshal of Legacy who systematically surveys all the youth of Atlas in search of anyone with notable Legacies; it is this particular Marshal noticing Atricia’s powerful ability long ago that promoted her hasty rise to Queenship.

  “Attie.” The Queen smiles. “You haven’t called me that in years.”

  “It was an accident,” admits Janlord with a teasing smile. Of all the men and women of Cloud Keep, he always treated her the kindest. Even becharmed as he is by her Legacy—by now, everyone in the Lifted City is—his kindness still feels authentic somehow. “I don’t think I can be blamed. You were a young Queen when we first met, and still are.” He is young himself, though still has ten years more on his face than she on hers.

  Atricia isn’t so old herself. She’s a modest age where she could easily call herself the younger sister to any of the Marshals, or a daughter to countless guards of Cloud Keep. “Call me whatever you want. Queen Attie, Queen Atricia, Queen Of Grimy Coins … I’ve heard it all.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” Janlord takes only two steps into the room, does not close the door. “I don’t mean to unrest you, Queen, but activities in the slums have worsened. There is talk of an uprising, serious talk. Already sixty have been apprehended and await your judgment.”

  “Uprising?” She tastes the word. “But I am the Slum Queen. I am one of them … They think it and say it, don’t they?”

  “I fear even a title like Slum Queen can’t quench a starving man of all his
hungers, no matter. From there you may be …” he starts.

  “But I’m there no longer,” the Queen finishes, annoyed. She whips across the chamber, steals a pitcher of brew and helps herself to a glass. “Let them have a try at the throne, see if they can manage a whole city of whiners and complainers. Everyone has their selfish needs. No one can be happy if everyone’s happy.”

  “Then, I regret by those words, my position as so-called Marshal of Peace would be rendered pointless.” Janlord smiles wanly. “My Queen. Might I suggest hearing the worst of the complaints? Then I would happily counsel you toward a resolution that may benefit us, both down there and up here.”

  “Let’s hear it.” Atricia folds up her legs on the feathery bed, takes a pillow beneath her elbows and nurses the brew in her hand.

  And so she listens to the story of how terribly she’s managed the Last City of Atlas—or at least that’s how she interprets the lecture. The people hoped her Queenship would lift the slums to better heights, seeing as she’s one of them. So much opportunity, so many possibilities … that’s what they smell, those greedy lowborn. The word ‘lowborn’ applies to her no longer, they are saying, not since her ass found the cold chair of past rulers at the top of Cloud Tower. Yes, yes, the slummers show great promise here and there. Even the Marshal of Legacy said so—Oh, the Legacies he’s seen!—but Queen Atricia has not promoted any of those talented slummers to a post up in the Lifted City. She wants it all to herself, the Slum bitch!—that is likely what they really said, though Janlord is kind enough to censor the language in her presence. You’re an awful Queen, they chant. Selfish, greedy, liar … Well, maybe Janlord isn’t telling it to her in these words, but it’s certainly all she hears. With a muffled mind and a heart fortified of barbed wire and a belly filling with brew, she lets her ears swallow the rest of the bile that Janlord carefully pours into them.

  Everyone in Atlas is selfish and wants it all, all, all. And when they get it all, they ask for more.

  “When I dreamed of being Queen,” she muses, her glass spilling drops like specks of blood across the white sheets, “as an idealistic little girl, I imagined having everything I wanted. Any pretty necklace, any fine sword, any man. For someone who sees truths, I certainly knew how to believe in such lies.” Her smile sits like a thing awkwardly balanced on her nose. “Don’t they know, even if they get what they want, they have nothing? Even if they had any man, if they had every man … they’d have no man?” She laughs hollowly, the sharp sound of her voice slapping along the tiles and the furniture and the wind. “Really, I’m doing them a favor by keeping them away. Protecting their idealism. Protecting their dreams …”

  When she looks at her advisor, she finds Janlord’s eyes cast to the floor. He does not seem to agree. Or maybe it’s that he does and simply cannot say so. Is he afraid? Is he afraid like all men are afraid? You could always speak to me, she beseeches him, her eyes blurred by the brew, surely not by tears; a Queen doesn’t cry. You could always speak, so what’s got your tongue now? The silence of doubts presses into her, begs her to break it.

  “There was a boy from the slums …” she starts to say.

  And then something terrible grips her heart, chokes the words that were only a moment ago about to spill forth. Maybe it’s the brew. Maybe it’s fear. Oh, has something got her tongue now? Just the name floats at the end of her mouth, dares to spill out … It tastes of sweetness and poison and longing, a pill she can neither spit nor swallow.

  “A boy?” asks Janlord.

  She keeps the name and the words and the secret to herself, corrects her face, and smiles like a fool into the wind. “Tell me, should I shut the balcony doors, or let this whirlwind have at us? It’s only mother nature greeting us.”

  “And it’s only their nature,” he responds quietly, and even with the wind’s bounteous tails whipping recklessly about the chamber, his weak voice carries, “that brings humans who have less, to tear at the ankles of those who have more, until neither you have feet nor legs to stand on.”

  “So what do I do, Janlord, Marshal of Whiners? Offer them all a life up here in the Lifted City, all thousand, all the thousands of them? Who’s left to run the factories and mines and farmlands but rats and alley cats, then?” She moves her empty glass to the table by her bed, misses it by an inch. It drops to the floor and cries out a song of shattering that echoes up to the ceiling and out the windows tall. For this little moment, the wind is silenced and all that is heard is the glass’s ringing lament. “Whatever,” she tells the shards on the floor, then flings herself across the bed.

  A man could sooth her right now. One perfect specimen, a brawn of solid arms and thick figure … His weight pressed into her bed, the sheen of his body like a pool inviting her in. That’s exactly what she needs right now. Yes, yes, and she smiles, forgetting the world, yes, in, in, come in …

  Janlord is talking now, but she puts an ice-cold hand to her belly, still no shiver comes. The silk of her robes sliding along her shape, up her legs and her breasts and tickling her like an intimate friend … “I have seen many truths,” she agrees, interrupting whatever he was saying, giggles herself silly and rolls across the bed to stare up, up, up. If only stars were there above her bed to look at, up, up, up. Or another man’s beautiful face, up. But no one has seen my truth, Janlord, not even you, not even wise, all-knowing you …

  “You have heard what the people want,” he says with heaviness, “but a good Queen doesn’t give the people what they want; she gives them what they need.”

  Staring at the draped, silken canopy, she considers what, exactly, the people of Atlas need. How can she, Queen of Having All She Wants, know the first thing of what people need? All her life the only thing that has consumed her is wanting, wanting, wanting. Oh, the men that have come and gone, arriving with empty wallets and leaving with so much more than they knew. It’s possible that half the city already know her, half the men of the Last City of Atlas smitten by a lie, in love with a phantom, never to know freedom from her mad love.

  So be it, she thinks of the weakness of men, that my immortal Legacy will be one of lovers’ glut.

  The Marshal is dismissed, and the world becomes bleak and cold again. Maybe it was already. Standing at the precipice, the warm fingers of brew slowly let go her throat as the minutes swell into hours swell into nightfall. When the moon makes a sickly alabaster of her skin and her chamber and her world, there is another soft knock at the door. Are you him?

  “In,” says the Queen. In comes the boy.

  It’s over before it’s begun.

  Queen Of Truths

  Her new personal bodyguard is presented to her in the throne room instead of the Crystal Court or the Lifted City Guardian Barracks since it is, as Janlord put it, “too dangerous outside for a Queen with an uprising.” She resents with all the tingling hair follicles on her head that the needy, greedy coin-suckers of Atlas have put her in this degrading position, unable to leave her own home of Cloud Keep even to catch a stroll along the Eastly, or a whiff of the seducing aromas of Lord’s Garden.

  “A bodyguard has a name,” she announces dryly, careless that her voice reeks of being unimpressed and annoyed.

  Slumped like a dark ancient tree with too-heavy limbs, the man is dressed head to foot in black. The gear he wears, an armor crafted by cruel hands no doubt, clings to his bulky, solid form. His hair juts like needles across his forehead, and when he turns to face her, his rough and blemished face that has seen more fights in his youth than there are stars in the sky is as unsmiling as coal.

  Without lowering his face, eyes locked to hers with the grip of a taut chain, he lowers to a knee and says, “Tauron.”

  “Tauron.” So many tiresome emotions and worries hanging from her like greedy bloated leaches, she can’t keep the irritation out of even that one simple word, his name.

  “I devote my life to you,” he mutters darkly, “and should the rebels climb the Tower tall and break all your sieges, it is my li
fe they’ll have before yours. By order of the Marshal of Order Umber, and the Marshal of Peace Janlord, and the Marshal of Legacy Lyncia, I’m your life protector in day and in night.”

  “Good. Janlord spoke enough about you, trusting and principled and idealistic as he tends to be.” She gives a smirking sidelong glance at Janlord who, stoic as ever, only returns a simple nod. “Let’s hope, then, that I have no need for this bodyguard.”

  Says the one called Tauron: “There is always need.”

  Even that ugly darkness in his eye she might, in any other mood, find appealing, but in this touchy hour, it only inspires revolt and sadness in her stomach. But a bodyguard they’ve assigned her, and perhaps with all the city wrestling about her Keep spitting hate and wrath and sourness at her toes, it’s all for the better.

  When the message comes many hours later, the Queen is occupied in her private chambers with a man twice her size and weight in bronzed muscle, his eyes a lustrous copper that reflects the hard and sweaty work of an axe-swinger. Whether he swings said axes to cut trees or behead children, she doesn’t care; he swings them with two biceps the size of her head, biceps that flex when he holds her down and touches his stubble-hugged lips into her neck on his long and patient way from one end of her body to the other.

  She prefers them shaven, smooth and innocent … but with all the uprising and disorder, she didn’t even think to reprimand them for sending her such a rugged thing. She just took the man in all his unkemptness, smiled herself drunk, and slowly drew him to her bed like all the others.

  Are you him?

  But now the messenger waits at her door, and when a Queen has a million desserts at her disposal, she can simply set aside this rugged man for now—her heart an overworked drummer, the blood in her body thumping with the urgency of tiny deaths—and take to her head the heavy crown of duty.

  “What is it?” she sings, out of breath at her chamber door.