do
produce it—well, what does a lord do if his peasants are growing more food than they need?"
Yul shrugged. "What do you expect me to say, bro? They're his tenants!"
"Well, yeah, but." They passed a spiked iron gate, head-high and closed, behind which a big house squatted with sullenly shuttered windows. The wall resumed. "Here's the thing. Our families became rich, and bought titles of nobility, and married into the aristocracy. And after a generation or two they
were
noble houses. But we're still stuck in a sea of peasants who don't make anything worth shit, who don't generate surpluses because they know some guy in a suit of armor can take it away from them whenever he likes. We've got towns and artisans and apothecaries and some traders and merchants and they're . . . you've seen the Americans. They're not smarter than us. They don't work harder than the peasants on your father's land. They're not—most of them—rich because they inherited it. But two hundred years ago things over there took a strange turn, and now they're overwhelmingly wealthy. These people are . . . they're better off than us: not as good as the Americans, but doing well, getting better. So
what are they doing right?"
Huw stopped. The wall had come to an end, and ahead of them the road ran straight between a burned-out strip of row houses and a cleared field; but a group of four men had stepped into the highway in front of them, blocking the way ahead. They had the thin faces and hungry eyes of those who had been too long between hot meals.
"Yer bag. Give it 'ere," said the thinnest, sharpest man. He held out a hand, palm-up. Huw saw that it was missing two fingers. The men to either side of the speaker, hard-faced, held crudely carved shillelaghs close by their sides.
"I don't think so," replied Huw. He smiled. "Would you like to reconsider?" From behind his left shoulder he heard a rip of Velcro as Yul freed up his holster.
"They's the strangers wot moved on ole Hansen's farm," the skinny man—barely more than a teenager—at the left of the row hissed sharply.
The speaker's eyes flickered sideways, but he showed no sign of attention. "Git 'em, lads," he drawled, and the highwaymen raised their clubs.
Yul drew and fired in a smooth motion. His Glock cracked four times while Huw was pursuading his own weapon to point the right way. The two club-men dropped like sacks of potatoes. The skinny lad's jaw dropped; he turned and bolted into the field.
"Aw,
shit,"
said the sharp-faced speaker. He sounded disgusted, resigned even, but he didn't run. "Yez party men, huh?" Huw strained to make the words out through a combination of ringing ears, the thunder of his own heartbeat, and the man's foreign-sounding accent.
"That's right!" He kept his aim on the highwayman's chest.
Yul stayed out of his line of fire, performing an odd, jerky duck-walk as he scanned the sides of the road for further threats. "And you are . . . ?"
"Down on me luck." Abruptly, the highwayman sat down in the middle of the road and screwed his eyes shut fiercely. "G'wan shoot me. Better'n'starvin' to death like this past week. I'm ready."
"No. You're not worth the bullet." Huw stared at the highwayman over the sights of his pistol. A plan came to him. "You are under arrest for attempted robbery. Now, we can do this two different ways. First way is, we take you for trial before a people's court. They won't show you any mercy: Why should they? You're a highwayman. But the other way—if you want to make yourself useful to us, if you're very
useful,
my colleague and I can accidentally look the other way for a few seconds."
"Forget it, citizen. He's a villain: Once a villain always a villain. Let's find a rope—" Yul was just playing bad cop. Probably.
"What do ye want?" The highwayman was looking from Yul to Huw and back again in fear. "Yer playin' with me! Yer mad!"
"Dead right." Huw grinned. "On your feet. We're going into town and you're going to walk in front of us with your hands tied behind your back. The people's foe. And you know what? I'm going to ask you for directions and you're going to guide us truthfully. Do it well and maybe we won't hand you over to the tribunal. Do it badly—" He jerked his neck sideways. "Understand?"
The highwayman nodded fearfully. It was, Huw reflected, a hell of a way to hire a tour guide.
Framingham was a mess. From burned-out farmsteads and cottages on the outskirts of town to beggarmen showing their war wounds and soup kitchens on the curbsides, it gave every indication of being locked in a spiral of decline. But there were no further highwaymen or muggers; probably none such were willing to risk tangling with two openly armed men escorting a prisoner before them. Huw kept his back straight, attempting to exude unconscious authority.
We're party men, Freedom Riders. If nobody here's
seen
such before . . .
well, it would work right up until they ran into the real thing; and when that happened, they could world-walk.
"We're going to the main post office," Huw told the prisoner. "Then to"—he racked his memory for the name they'd plucked from a local newssheet's advertising columns—"Rackham's bookmaker. Make it smart."
The main post office was a stone-fronted building in a dusty high street, guarded by half a dozen desperadoes behind a barricade of beer casks from a nearby pub. Rackham's was a quarter mile past it, down a side street, its facade boarded over and its door barred.
They turned into an alleyway behind the bookmaker's. "You have ten seconds to make yourself invisible," Huw told his shivering prisoner, who stared at him with stunned disbelief for a moment before taking to his heels.
"Was that clever?" asked Yul.
"No, but it had to be done," Huw told him. "Or were you really planning on walking into a people's tribunal behind him?"
"Urn. Point, bro." Yul paused. "What do we do now?"
"We sell this next door." Huw tightened his grip on the satchel, feeling the gold ingots inside. "And then we go to the post office and post a letter."
"But it's not running! You saw the barricades? It's the Freedom Party headquarters."
"That's what I'm counting on," Huw said calmly—more calmly than he felt. "They've got a grip on the mass media—the phones, the email equivalents, the news distribution system. They're not stupid, they know about controlling the flow of information. Which means they're the only people who can get a message through to that friend of Miriam's—the skinny guy with the hat. Remember the railway station?" Brilliana had coopted Huw and his team, dragged them on what seemed at first like a wild goose chase to a one-platform stop in the middle of nowhere. They'd arrived in the nick of time, as Miriam's other pursuers—a political officer and a carload of police thugs—had surrounded the ticket office where she and Erasmus Burgeson were barricaded inside. "The problem is getting their attention without getting ourselves shot. Once we've got it, though . . ." He headed towards the bookmaker's, where a pair of adequately fed bouncers were eyeing the passersby. ". . . We're on the way."
The committee watched the presidential address, and the press conference that followed it, in dead silence.
The thirty-two-inch plasma screen and DVD player were alien intrusions in the wood-and-tapestry-lined audience room at the west of the royal palace. The portable gasoline generator in the antechamber outside throbbed loudly, threatening to drown out the recorded questions, played through speakers too small for a chamber designed for royal audiences in an age before amplification. The flickering color images danced off the walls, reflecting from the tired faces of the noble audience. Many of them still wore armor, camouflage surcoats over bulletproof vests and machine-woven titanium chain mail. They were the surviving officers of the Clan's security organization, and such of the Clan's other leaders as were deemed trustworthy, ignorant of or uninvolved in the abortive putsch mounted by the lords of the postal corvee. Wanted men, one and all.