The truce, which had become pretty rusty as the years ticked by anyway, was finally broken for good and all when Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones, administrative assistant to the Amazonian Vice Priestess of Reading & Bracknell (Inclusive), smote Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull Chartered Accountant Julian Buxton on the back of the head with a redwood birthing board at the Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull annual summer picnic and rounders game, knocking him unconscious and dragging him by his already thinning hair to her one-bedroom hut just off the M4 near Slough, impressing him into lifelong concubinage. Because the picnic/rounders game was being held miles away from Slough on Camberwell Green and therefore well inside the generally agreed Central London Non-Hostility Zone - having been relocated from Hampstead, where an outbreak of malaria had felled most of the Highgate Ursuline Sisters of Mercy Charity Football Summer League and where also the crocs in the men’s bathing pond had shown higher aggression of late, consuming at least three swimmers as well as a bushwalker with no doubt lecherous intent; and because such a kidnapping was a direct violation of Clause 5, Section 4, of the Non-Hostilities Pact 1985 in any event, regardless of area; and because Ponce-Jones, though not in the Amazonian governmental hierarchy herself per se, was nevertheless in line for a title and therefore directly affiliated with the Amazonian government, being, as mentioned, the administrative assistant to Vice Priestess Margaret Hassellbeck; and finally because Buxton, aside from being a fully qualified Chartered Accountant and therefore off-limits regardless, was also Deputy Treasurer for the Protectorate National Society of Chartered Accountants, Southern Division, and therefore an actual junior member of the Chartered Accountancy Government; for all reasons stated above, all-out war was more or less inevitable.
Which complicated my life to no end.
I, being your narrator, am named Sally Rae Thomasina Wentworth, Sally Rae being my two-name first name after my mother Sally RaeAnne Chenowith, of the Charleston, South Carolina Chenowiths, and Thomasina being after my father, Thomas Quiller Wentworth of the Atlanta, Georgia Wentworths. I was born forty-seven years ago in Savannah, Georgia, in the United Protestant States of America to Mr and Mrs Wentworth before they took up their permanent commission as missionaries for the American Southern Baptist Church of Christ In God to the Amazon Nation of Great Britain when I was the age of ten years. This first, and last, posting for Mr and Mrs Wentworth (young narrator in tow) was the Isle of Man.
I am from the American South, but I am not of it, whereas I am of the Isle of Man but not from it. This is important.
It is possible, depending upon your personal, individual attentions, that you may have heard of me or may at least have seen me on television standing next to or near or in the vicinity of Queen Joanne II on state or diplomatic occasions. I serve HRH in the capacity of Domestic Affairs Advisor, an appointed position rather than one selected from the House of Commons, as my place of birth, being no fault of my own, nevertheless prevents me from serving in HRH’s Parliament as an elected official. This is both important and not. I am a member of HRH’s cabinet but am destined to remain forever ex officio.
This is not a complaint. I am honoured to serve HRH, long may she reign.
Although the definitive action that brought on the war - Ponce-Jones’ impressment of Buxton - was taken by an Amazon, HRH, in a typical display of initiative and with the aid of advice proffered by your narrator, decided to attack the Chartered Accountancy Protectorate first, because if war was inevitable, why not ‘act boldly in the best Amazonian tradition’ (said HRH, parroting me) and just get the whole thing started off to the best advantage of our side? Makes sense.
Two squadrons of forty soldiers attacked the CAP Arms Depot near Luton. Leaving their horses behind so as to blitz in the silence that only highly trained troops of the Amazonian army can muster, the eighty soldiers plus four sergeants plus one captain set on the surprisingly under-defended depot, taking it quickly and with minimal loss of life on our side. Fifteen CAP soldiers were killed: the remaining six were impressed. The first casualties of war. (‘Twenty-one soldiers to guard an important arms depot?’ asked HRH, quite rightly. ‘Why did we wait so long to attack them, is my question.’) Only two Amazons were killed, two more welcome guests at the Great Feast, lucky sows.
A lot of paperwork was involved as well, and fortunately I have competent and capable assistants to handle most of it or I would be buried because war generates forms and reports like nothing else on Goddess’ Green Earth. When, for illustrative purposes, HRH launched an initiative against the French Farmer’s Republic Isle of Jersey when I was the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Domestic Affairs Advisor, under the late Dame Edith Chalwin-Prichard, it took seventeen different personnel in our office alone not excluding myself nor Dame Edith (about whom let it never be said that she was afraid of real grunt work) to type the necessary documentation. And that was for a wee little island with nothing on it but an amusement park that HRH had taken a fancy to, which of course didn’t stop the FFR from causing a ridiculously overblown kerfuffle in the Assembly of Nations, as if that feeble bunch of do-nothings ever once accomplished anything useful or indeed at all.
But from the CAP Depot, yes. Mountains of paperwork but nearly 600 spears and over 400 muskets were taken, and I ask you, if the CAP were not anticipating war, despite their repeated claims, why would they have such a fully stocked depot? I ask you.
As you will have gathered from the brief history above (of which more in a moment) I am a naturalized Amazon, having completed citizenship proceedings at the age of twenty-one with six hundred and eleven other hopefuls in a very moving ceremony hosted by HRH herself. We held our hands across our chests, bodies sheathed in formal leather singlets, a ceremonial bow or spear or flail as per personal preference in our free hand, and renounced all ties to inferior pasts, becoming by proclamation Amazons, despite a noticeable lack of height in comparison to the sternly helpful Immigration Officers present and the sternly kind personage of HRH, looming down at us with the one and only real Sceptre of War in one hand and the actual immensely impressive Mace of Might in the other, thereby underlining for all six hundred and twelve freshly minted Amazons the real and true sombreness and seriousness and underlying importance of the ceremony we had just gone through.
For me, for one, it was the least they could do.
Why, in a question that gets lost in the mists of time - or the rasping, raking, grabbing claws of time or the general vague yet unshakeable depressing fog of time, your choice - did Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones so boldly break a years and years-old truce for the sake of the individual man Julian Buxton? Or more succinctly, why do wars begin?
I have talked myself into a corner there, do you see? I know the answer to the first question, but I do not, in fact, know any such answer to the second. Why do wars begin? Any wars at all. You may be surprised to hear this from me yet nevertheless I am here to tell you that nothing good ever comes from any war. Ever. Of any kind. Only scarred and scared generations of young dying on front lines, puffing up only those old and powerful and arrogant and, most importantly, distant enough to imagine themselves as the hand of destiny, the God or Goddess of War (for the Amazons to whom I have allieged are far from guiltless), directing the fates of worlds when it’s really only the fates of the twenty-somethings and, heaven save us from our sins, teenagers who we send to die and die and die. Notice how it’s always called the ‘spoils’ of war. Medals of coagulated blood, celebration pyres for the dead, telegrams and letters and emails now of grief in terse sentences. At least Amazons are guaranteed seats at the Great Feast if they die in battle.
If you believe that. Which sometimes, if I’m honest with you, I wonder, especially now that ‘battle’ has expanded the definition of itself to include such things as death by natural causes after retirement from being a shopping-centre security guard or death by car crash if the dogcatcher wagon overturns, watering down I think the Great Feast table into just another boring convention of uniformed women. I wonder.
But, yes, again the motivations of Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones. It was love clearly or at least what the young so often mistake for love and, frankly, who are we in middle age to say that it isn’t love, that rush of adrenalin and hormones that feels hot and cool at the same time like a frozen creamy cocktail. Why is that not love but yes this companionable settling that we do as life goes on is? Maybe love really is only for the young and the old co-opt it as we do everything and call our watered-down if quite comfortable version the only ‘real’ love. Tippi was in love with Julian Buxton. I could see it with my own two eyes. Simple. Plain as the nose on your face. Because if the fizz in her voice and behind her smile and in the flush of her skin wasn’t love, then why bother with love at all and not just take whatever it is she has? If Tippi wasn’t in love, then love’s been scooped by something that looks far better or at least more fun, is my opinion.
My parents Mr and Mrs Wentworth were young, too, when they arrived on the Isle of Man with ten-year-old me along as something they could cling to. They were both twenty-six years old. Twenty-six. Can you imagine a twenty-six-year-old these days moving across the ocean with spouse and child in tow for no salary, only living expenses, suffering deprivations including no running water for the first year, all to preach an evangelist gospel of mostly American nonsense but with a few good ideas interspersed including pacifism which was like kerosene on a campfire as far as the Amazons were concerned? Nor can I, though I suppose they must exist because as far as I know the ASBCofCinG Missionary Service is still around, sending off dazed smiling youths (maybe) filled with the fire of God or at least a challenge or at the very least ham-fisted good intentions, off to parts unknown, unexplored, unChristianised certainly, sending them to serious hardship, certain struggle, potential doom. I wonder what those missionaries look like now, though I wouldn’t want to meet one to find out, I don’t think.
My parents were true believers which 37 years ago was less of a thing. Earnest and fresh-faced and eager to proselytise, they moved into a tiny central terraced house in Jurby East. Why not Douglas? Why not Castletown or even Peel? I do not know. Jurby East was where the church sent them and Jurby East is where they went. Isolated amongst Amazons, miles from the nearest town, they set to work. They started operating a little church in our sitting-room, and for a very long time, my mother and father took turns making up half of the congregation of two while the other preached to me and whoever’s turn it was.
My parents, in a ludicrous oversight all too common amongst purveyors of do-goodery, had not been taught to speak Amazonian. They were expected to pick up the language from the Manx Amazons. Being a child language-sponge, this meant practically that I at ten years of age was expected to learn the language and translate for them. As I was not, however, allowed by Amazonian law to attend an Amazonian school, this was problematic. Nor were we permitted to shop in any Amazonian store save a piss-poor designated one six miles away, nor could we attend Amazonian movies, nor own a car to drive on Amazonian roads, nor bank in any Amazonian savings institution, and on and on. To say that missionaries were barely tolerated by the Amazonian government is to risk over-generosity. They didn’t want my parents there but had reluctantly acquiesced to international law to allow them in.
Despite all the difficulties, and there were nothing but, my parents after a year and a half managed a convert. One. The bus driver who drove the route to the grocery store six miles away and who had seen my mother dragging me onto her bus every Monday for eighteen months. Hostility turned to grudging turned to gruffness turned to conversation turned to conversion at a painstaking rate, but the first one is always the difficult one. KeithAnne was her name, all seven feet of her, friendly in a frowning sort of way, appalling table manners, but there she was. In the flesh. On a Sunday morning, too big for our inherited American Civil War-era blue Wodehouse tea cups, her fur skirt leaving an uneasy oil across the divan, and a quiver of arrows that I couldn’t keep my now-eleven-year-old eyes off of. Nonetheless, a convert.
Consequences were quick to follow.
Here, let me give you a list:
The Amazon laugh. I have worked hard to learn this laugh, and I am getting there. The Amazon laugh is like no other. Rich, deep, uninhibited, superior but happily so. An Amazon will not cover her mouth with her hand when she laughs. She will not form her lips to make vowel sounds of laughter, no ‘hoo hoo’ or ‘hee hee,’ only a loud, clanging cataclysm of air, an avalanche of plosives. Her laugh, like so much else Amazonian, is out-and-out warfare. It conquers. It does not comfort. An Amazon laughs like she just created a planet.
This is all the more impressive because Amazons as a rule have no sense of humour.
Physical Education Class, Year 11. When the time came to select volleyball teams, the two tallest, most athletic girls in the class, Margo Newman and Sophie Macquarrie-Adler, were chosen by PE Mistress Nobbier as captains. Out of a class of 22, despite being the shortest by over a foot and thumpingly average at volleyball, Margo Newman chose me sixth for her team - the eleventh choice overall, out of 22 remember - because she thought my ‘enthusiasm deserved a chance.’ If you need this explained to you, then perhaps you would never understand anyway and should move on to point 3.
The Amazonian Religion. True, the Amazonian religion, which has no name (another reason to like it), is a bit of an exclusive club. The Goddess, who has no name other than Goddess, demands the supplication of all non-Amazons, and this had led to all sorts of warfare, as you may have noticed. However, if you are an Amazon, and I am, don’t forget, all that the Goddess wants for you is your happiness. The Goddess never berates, never punishes. The Goddess is for you and against your enemies. Granted, the being-an-Amazon part is a pretty severe caveat, but if you’re in, you’re way, way in. As an Amazon, I am not allowed to say more.
HRH, on my fortieth birthday. Aside from the gifts she gave as Head of State (the silver service, the huge wax seal that I have used ever since for official correspondence), HRH gave me, on the side, in secret, away from official eyes, a butterfly from her gardens. It was an anomaly, she said, a blue Monarch which had slipped in unnoticed in its cocoon on a sequoia she had imported from the UPSA. It was the only blue Monarch in the entire Amazon, HRH told me, holding it lightly between her fingertips. ‘Know that it’s yours,’ she said, and we watched as she let it fly away free into the flowers of her garden. As a queen, HRH is incapable of friendships. She necessarily has only allies or foes. But, sometimes, she does try.
Because I have no need to. I know exactly why the CAP depot had enough weapons for a sortie, enough to puncture, blast, and otherwise injure the brave and fierce bodies of our Amazonian soldiers. I also know why only twenty-one soldiers guarded the depot and not the normal complement of fifty-five. I know why the Chartered Accountants moved half of their weapons (because, of course, yes, there were originally more) and more than half of their men only the day before the attack (and for accuracy, since these matters are important for posterity, both for ourselves and for its own sake, all of the CAP soldiers that day were indeed men, whilst all of ours were women; it is not often the stereotypes hold true, but they did that day, making at least an interesting or if not interesting then clarifying footnote in history’s own account books). I know, in other words, why the CAP left just enough men to let the depot look protected, though not as many as might have been there, and I know why they left enough arms to make it look fully stocked and ready for war, though again not as many as might have been.
I know because I told them to do this.
Most of the early fighting took place in the jungles of Hertfordshire, where our army, that is the Amazonian army (I suppose I don’t know for sure who your army might be), was clearly at an advantage. It was swamp fighting of the stickiest, sinkingest, most mosquito-filled type. All brute force, ambushes, and slaughter at no further away than the length of your arm. We naturally excelled and in no time at all the Chartered Accountants were routed, making, if I may say so, a brave last stand in St Albans before it too finally fell to a sky filled with the rapidly finishing arcs of spears and arrows.
The plan, self-evident in its simplicity, was to take the surrounding counties first, leaving the CAP trapped inside the M25. Berkshire, et al would be as easy as Herts for our army. The CAP had never really gotten the hang of jungle-battling and had only received the outlying counties as concession for the Port at Dover (and thereby releasing putative control of the Eurostar tunnel to us) in the Non-Hostilities Pact of 1985. What to do after driving them into Central London was a tougher question. Urban fighting was well within our considerable war talents - had we not taken Manchester and Glasgow from the Vikings? - but the Chartered Accountants lived and breathed urban life, literally. We were good at urban warfare; they were great. So for now, we buckled down, surrounding London, which is no small feat, but then again as the horrendously aged war slogan goes (for we have had many, many, many wars), ‘Amazons are not known for their small feet!’ Are you laughing?
HRH wisely scheduled entertainment for the troops, including television comediennes, an Irish rap group, and concert performances of musicals featuring the original casts from Hove’s West End. As I understand it, there was a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in Watford that went down a treat.
So, KeithAnne, who loomed better than anyone I have ever met, other Amazons included, loomed as in towered, as in much bigger than, not as in weaving, although I suspect she probably could have done that as well, we Amazons being nothing if not multi-skilled. KeithAnne, our first Amazonian Baptist, the first anywhere as far as anyone knew and so far last, including yours naturalised truly.
Because there were objections you see. Less objections than anger. Less anger even than outrage, not to put too fine a point on it, and retribution, brutal and swift. Missionaries were barely tolerated under international law but what wasn’t tolerated was any degree of success whatsoever. The Amazonian government, then under a teenage HRH who therefore may or may not hold responsibility in any but a titular way, could not of course sanction what happened to my parents, but once KeithAnne, in true zealous convert fashion, for there is no better or at least more eager preacher on earth than the recently born again, began to proselytize to all her co-Amazons, some violent rejoinder was unavoidable.
My poor parents heard nary a mumble of discontent in Jurby East before a window was quietly broken one night and both their throats slit by the hunting knife of an Amazon, who then spared my own life. Why? Only she knows. KeithAnne, besides immediately adopting me, ignoring the pleas of my own government and church, bless her, complained vociferously all the way through the courts, on through the House of Ladies to HRH herself. HRH, while not publicly denouncing the crime, made an offer to welcome me, after a state-funded education and upbringing, into the Amazon race when I reached my adulthood, bless her as well.
So my life changed abruptly. I had a new Amazon mother, new Amazon friends who with disappointing predictability called me ‘Shorty’ but who also loved me, and a new Amazon outlook on life, one which I grew to embrace passionately. I embrace it even to this day, even after KeithAnne, with typical loving frankness, detailed for me the exact societal circumstances and implications of my parents’ deaths, though I can’t say I hadn’t guessed what had happened but what do you do when handed that news at eleven? As eleven-year-olds in general and eleven-year-old girls in particular are wells of unfocussed anger anyway, I suppose I did the human thing and split it off from myself, built it its own cabinet and locked it away. An unseen fire still gives off heat though, so as much of a love as I have for my race, I still managed to cock one ear when a female CAP operative, having thoroughly researched my history, made a lengthy and subtle offer about information-gathering for the enemy government.
I am a proud Amazon. And I am also a spy against them. You should ask me how that is possible.
Of course Amazons have been impressing Chartered Accountants since time immemorial, but for the last hundred years at least, it has been less concubinage than out-and-out relationships which is understandable if perhaps slightly dull. Times change. People modernise. One realises that bludgeoning a man into submission may not perhaps always get you the perfect husband. The Scottish Amazonian Parliament, now that they’ve realised they can pass a law or two and no one will care or in fact notice, have even formalised an agreement with the Viking governments of Norway and Sweden allowing border perforation for ceremonial Amazon impressments into Scandinavia with reciprocal ceremonial Viking pillagings in the Highlands. Tradition lives on and no one gets hurt. Besides, you have to find a spouse somehow.
Tippi Ponce-Jones, though, was landed gentry, set in due course to become no less than the eleventh Duchess of Shrewsbury, and in those sorts of households the unspoken rules are a bit different. If it had been one of Tippi’s younger sisters, Reggie, say, then the current Duchess, a frightful old piece of stonework named Cosima, might not have cared as much, but as Tippi was future upper crust there were certain procedures to be followed, certain familial pieties to be upheld. Julian Buxton fit nowhere in this.
I have known Cosima Ponce-Jones for twenty years but have disliked her for much longer. She used to be Shadow Culture Secretary in the House of Ladies, a minor post, but no one apparently told Cosima. She was the bane of anything that fell remotely outside of traditional Amazon blood art or wood carving, blasting in her aristocratic gasbag way to the rightwing tabloids about ‘Amazonian values’, as if 3,000 years of fierceness and pride were endangered by giant plastic children or an ibex in formaldehyde. She was forced to resign after disrupting an extremely popular Noh Theatre Festival in Leicester by garrotting the visiting French director, a matter of finally picking the wrong target.
Tippi, miraculously, was, is, a delightful girl. Bright, smart, pretty in a fierce yet bookish sort of way, managing to excel at one of those debutante jobs that are not supposed to involve anything other than smiling and a day or two of filing once a month to make the deb feel like one of the ‘people,’ whoever they are. She met Accountant Buxton at a diplomatic soiree organised in a sweet irony by her own mother. Let us not mistake the hosting of the party as any indication whatsoever of Cosima Ponce-Jones’ politics; she loathed anything foreign in the way that only minor royalty can. Remember though that she was trying to get back in the of course invited HRH’s good graces with a view to returning to the House of Ladies by Royal Appointment. As this was the only reason she forced herself to smile widely and think of Amazonia at the blank, pasty faces of the Chartered Accountants who had invaded her home, imagine her horror upon seeing young Tippi sharing a laugh downwards to/with one Mr Buxton, she with nostrils flaring, he with a finger shyly tripping the edge of his wine glass.
Cosima split them up as quickly as diplomacy allowed, sending Tippi on her way bedroomwards and introducing Buxton to the Ladies Brockenwell, the two oldest and most boring twins in the entire UQ. An undaunted Tippi continued inquiries on and then to Mr Buxton through - despite her better judgment - your narrator who is a good friend to have if your mother is unpopular and you want to date a foreigner. Cosima eventually found out, though not about the complicity of yours truly, when happening upon a love letter, of all the romantic, old-fashioned and more to the point completely un-Amazonian things, at least to the Amazons of Cosima’s generation.
Family severance was threatened, trust funds were placed into caretakers’ hands, Reggie was given Tippi’s eldest-sister room. The straw that broke the particular camel’s back for Tippi was when Cosima miscalculated again - the woman would be genuinely evil if she weren’t so untalented - and mailed an answering letter in Tippi’s name to Mr Buxton, ending the relationship and doing her level best to wound him so badly that he wouldn’t open further letters or accept future contact.
Why would she think that would work? I’m asking because I genuinely do not know. Sometimes my adopted race is a mystery to me, even after these many years.
Tippi in short order got herself the flat in Slough and made her daring solo raid on the Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull annual summer picnic and rounders game. The clubbing with the birthing board wasn’t strictly necessary, but by this point, Tippi was caught up in the drama of the thing. Bless her in her ignorance. She couldn’t have known the consequences of her actions.
The stupid, naïve, selfish, little cow.
HRH often says that the CAP is ‘nothing more than a consulate grown malignant’ which as with such pronouncements of every world leader in the history of humankind leaves out much more than half the story. To recap: When war broke out in the Belgian Stock Exchange, weak Amazon Queen Jessica XII allowed the democratically elected government, fleeing from certain execution, to take up residence in their London embassy. After the Venture Capitalists won the day in Brussels, Queen Jessica gave up a substantial plot of land to the now-exiled now-former democratically elected government. The CAP was formed and somehow, incredibly, though it probably has most to do with not having to cross either the Channel or the North Sea for impressments, it remained. Various Queens up to and including our own beloved long may she reign HRH have skirmished with it, with varying degrees of success and withdrawal, but all at most with halfheartedness. We don’t want the CAP to go anywhere. We like them there. But we also like them to know that we’re all around here and that they shouldn’t forget it.
It works for everyone.
Except for me. And HRH. But to my eternal regret for different reasons.
My title of Domestic Affairs Advisor incorporates duplicity within itself. The CAP would in the eyes of the world fall under the brief of Dame Geraldine Wiggins, Foreign Affairs Advisor. In the real and far more complicated world in which we are all forced to live, HRH regards the CAP as part of the Amazon, waiting to be reincorporated, and therefore under the purview of the Domestic Affairs Advisor, but secretly so, so that no one would know our intentions.
Which is where I came in.
As promised, HRH kept an eye over my schooling and upbringing. I was given a junior post in government, again appointed rather than elected, and kept in close consultation with HRH. She took a sisterly liking to me as far as she was able (see above for the friendship incapability of monarchs), but there were specific reasons, too. I was an Amazon, but I was not. I was a Manxwoman, but I was not. I was an American, but I was not. Domestic Affairs Advisor, as HRH envisioned it, demanded duplicity, demanded understanding of overt intentions which cloaked covert ones, demanded overall a talent for duality. So, Sally Rae Wentworth at your service. What HRH was not to know was that I was better at my job than she would have wanted or guessed.
Because and yes the war continued, but what the world couldn’t know was that HRH was playing this one for keeps. The time had come, now that the Non-Hostilities Pact 1985, negotiated by the CAP Mayor and a high-level Amazonian known only as S (guess), had been called off on the convenient pretext of Tippi Ponce-Jones. The Home Counties taken in a breeze, we commenced border attacks on the M25.
‘Yet somehow they always seem to be ready for us,’ says HRH, creasing her regal brow. ‘Somehow.’
They have asked for an assassination, which I have of course refused and which only proves how deeply I am misunderstood by both sides. They think my motivation (for what?) is revenge upon the Amazons, which it is but also isn’t. I am torn, have always been torn. My eleven-year-old’s rage demands a victim, demands a head on a platter as payment for the dance. And yet Amazon blood, which does not in fact run through my veins, nevertheless runs through my veins. Am I am who I am, or am I am who I have chosen or rejected, even if I didn’t really choose or reject? Because at what point does a person become a people? Did Amazons kill my parents or did an Amazon kill my parents?
The violent deaths of my mother and father did leave their mark, but only in my aversion to violence, an aversion which was built upon the gospel my parents lived and breathed, which KeithAnne, even during the brevity of her exposure to them, embraced and passed along to me.
An aversion to violence. In an Amazon. It would be funny.
I am minimising casualties to as much of an extent as I can by keeping the CAP abreast of our plans, but I am taking lives by prolonging this war, which is not my intention. I could give them enough information to end it, but the cost could very well be too great for the Amazon nation, which is also not my intention. I do not mourn or pick over my betrayal because the very savagery of my own soldiers that I see in day-to-day operations convinces me that my actions are right, and yet I do mourn and pick over my betrayal because that savagery is the vibrant lifeblood of the world that has raised me, has made me as much as possible one of their own. I am an Amazon, and I am not. I am both, and I am neither.
Surely, I am that most worthless of idealists, stuck on the fence, paralysed and useless, unable to act or able to act only in ways that are opposite to what I believe. How do you get here if all the work you do is to not get here?
We made a great stride forward. Moving up from Wimbledon and down from Harrow, we swiftly beat the CAP army back through the West End and, despite heavy fighting in the City, on out into the East End. The CAP government is now holed up in Hackney, its demise inevitable and imminent. Over 16,000 CAP troops died, along with over 31,000 Amazons, the greater skill at urban warfare giving CAP the greater impact if not the victory. The Great Feast is now crowded and boisterous well beyond belief.
HRH smiled cryptically at me today. I wonder if I was able to hide my surprise at our stride forward quickly enough.
I walk through the Palace, holding my head up, feeling a deep calm that exists only because fear by this time has become pointless. I have failed, though failure implies a cohesive aim, which I do not have and never had. I have dissembled. I have been unable to reconcile. Despite and because of my best efforts, people have died, the war has continued, is almost won. A people whom I love and hate, persons whom I only love. Perhaps there really is no end to this division. So the CAP are nearly conquered, but will HRH discover that I have been right for the wrong reasons? Who are the Amazons without an enemy? How can you take away war from those you love when taking away war would cause them to cease being the person that you love? I have reached forty-seven, and the waters remain muddied.
I will not reach forty-eight, it seems.
The room is warm as I enter, and unguarded. Why should they need guards when they are Amazons, and I am not? The elected Cabinet sit in a half-circle with HRH at the centre. They all look at me, stern, though they are always stern. I ignore them and study only the face of HRH. Is disappointment there? Is anger? My thirty years of friendship cannot overcome her lifetime of Royal training. I am unable to read her gaze.
She waits for a moment, and then she speaks.
‘Sally Rae?’ she says and, yes, it is definitely a question.