Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Thande
Donor
I did post a map (that needs a few corrections) before beginning the Pandoric War, but the link appears to have died, so I will repost it next time I am on the right computer.
Thande
Donor
Aye, that's the one.
Apologies for the bump but I thought you all might like to know that a story by @Doctor What and myself has been nominated for a Sidewise Award!
I'd like to thank everyone who's ever commented and supported on the LTTW threads because that has really helped make my AH writing possible.
And we'd like to thank you for writing this unstoppable juggernaut of a TL! Seeing updates here is usually the highlight of my month, and I know I'm not the only one.
Thande
Donor
And to celebrate further, another segment update (this is the second segment of Part #244: Collapses)
Zinnik-Soignies [Zinnik Side], Kingdom of the Reunited Netherlands [a.k.a. Belgium]
February 22nd 1899
Charles Grey fought with all his might to avoid anxiously looking up as they approached the customs house with its black-striped barrier. While Belgium and France had not been openly at war since before Charles’ father had been born, relations between Brussels and Paris had never been anything more than ‘correct’ since the Route des Larmes and the Malraux Doctrine. Charles knew the period well, as it was the same one that had resulted in his family being effectively turfed out of Britain by the Populists and forced to seek a new fortune from scratch. Out of revenge for the crimes de guerre the Belgians had inflicted on their French-speaking Walloon minority, the French had deliberately supported any and every other possible rival possessor of the former Dutch colonies that the Belgians had tried to claim. Mostly this had meant the exilic Dutch republicans in Batavia and Guyana and the Cape—which, kept alive temporarily by French aid, had eventually then fallen into Meridian orbit via the Hermandad. Greys had played a role there, too: adventurers, soldiers of fortune, in high demand from Dutch colonials who had plenty of money from trade but were short of officers to help resist the Belgian attempts to annex their lands.
Now, Charles suspected, the French government probably thought much the way he as a latter-day Grey did. Belgium wasn’t much, these days, though it might prove enough to tip the balance against the Germans as their military struggled under yet another front opening up. Though the bloodies boasted of Belgium’s alleged spy network, the kingdom wasn’t powerful enough to be a serious threat on the world stage. The Meridians—they whom the French and the Greys had ultimately helped by their actions—were another matter. They were losing this war now, but they remained strong enough to yet prolong it for years more misery. Perhaps.
He shook the thought aside. None of this was relevant. Still, he supposed, looking preoccupied was probably better than looking guilty. His eyes started to flick upwards and he instantly, guiltily, looked aside again. No! Stop it!
It was no good. Charles Grey was many things, but he would never be an actor. It was just as well, then, that this role was decidedly one to be played by a mere extra. He re-settled the rod of the palanquin on his shoulder.
He knew she was there, behind the curtains, reclining on the seat, stunning in a form of coldly artificial beauty. Cheung Amoy. His fiancée, the high-spirited girl from the middle-class suburbs of Hanjing, the confident and determined woman who had stuck by her man in his darkest hour. But not today. Today, she was a princess.
Though they had not had much time since learning that Belgium’s entry into the war was imminent from the Man’s contacts (by mutual agreement, they simply named him ‘the Man’ in conversation lest they be overheard), they had still managed to debate several possible plans. None of them had been anything other than what Charles would have called ‘half-baked’ under better circumstances. But these were the circumstances they had.
Anyway, Amy (as he had always named her) had been a problem in all of them, as had her cousin Cheung Wong, who had accompanied them on the long and difficult sea journey to Europe. Chinese people were not completely unknown in Europe, of course, but they were hardly common enough to fit the bill of ‘unmemorable, generic blank’ that the team needed to create in the minds of the customs guards. They were too exotic.
Amy had had some ideas about that. She could wear smoked glasses to hide her eyes. She could use dephlog-water to dye her hair blonde![7] The Man had vetoed all of this—it was winter, after all, hardly the season for dark glasses. It would only take one customs guard to get slightly suspicious and ask her to remove her glasses.
The problem had been considered further from a number of angles. Could they get away with the idea of having Chinese servants? But no, it was still too unusual. Ironically, the success of Charles’ ancestors (and the French) in neutralising Belgian colonial ambitions meant that there were no Far Eastern Belgian colonies left that might have made people from that region a more commonplace site in the Low Country. A different idea was needed.
In the end, perhaps inevitably, it had come from The Man himself. Many of his lieutenants (who would be escaping through other means, being less watched) were shocked at the idea. But it had appealed to Charles. It had a certain historical resonance to it. Despite what they were asking Amy to do.
And now, here they were. Charles had done many things in this war so far, from fighting the Siamese in a burning jungle to spending months sunk into a coma on the verge of death. But this was something else.
The customs guard raised his eyebrows at Cheung Wong as Amy’s cousin stepped forward, ahead of the palanquin, and gave the guard a look so dismissive that it felt as though the cobblestones beneath his feet should have been scorched. He said something impatiently in Authentic Hangjingese,[8] a tongue which even scholars of the Orient in Brussels were unlikely to understand. Then he theatrically sighed, keeping his face utterly immobile, and switched to halting French. “You...barbarian...gatekeepers...will let the Lady...” He said a name that was a popular but disreputable brand of tooth whitener in Hanjing, and Charles fought to keep a straight face. “In your tongue, the Lady...Dragon Lotus...pass.” Wong looked at the guards as though it was the natural order of the universe that they should step aside. The sun rose in the morning, the tides came in and out, mere barbarian ghost scum should kowtow to the presence of the Lady Dragon Lotus.
The guard took a look at the party. Charles tried to imagine what he was seeing from his own perspective. A Chinese man dressed in a glorious, excessive silk robe, his hair in an elaborate queue, a gigantic emblem on his chest depicting a panda-bear with a Chinese character, a long moustache drooping from beneath his nose and past his thin, disapproving lips. Charles himself had a false moustache stuck beneath his own nose, a decidedly less magnificent one. He was one of four men in labourers’ clothes, save for each bearing a red headband with more Chinese characters on them, one at each corner of the fantastically decorated palanquin. The palanquin was clearly of a European design, bought here and probably adapted from a steam vehicle, but a game attempt had been made to paint and decorate it in the overly ornate Chinese style. The curtains, gold thread tracing the designs of butterflies and birds against their mauve tyrine-dyed base, twitched slightly and a hand languidly emerged, waving impatiently to Wong. The hand bore long, elaborately lacquered nails that would render it useless for almost any task: the mark of one who had servants to call upon for even the most minor of troubles. (Charles hoped desperately those would stay on—there had been no time to actually grow out Amy’s nails, of course, so horn shavings, glued in place and then lacquered, had been hastily substituted).
The first guard muttered something to his colleague in Dutch, not a language that Charles knew. He could instantly tell what was being said, nonetheless, because he could alienistically read their thoughts on their faces. He recognised the situation precisely. This looks like a possibly sticky situation—can’t just let them through, but if I don’t, it might cause an international incident. Best get my superior officer, then he can take the blame.
Indeed, the second guard hurried off. Wong said nothing, but if anything managed to look even more contemptuously at the first guard. From behind the curtain, Amy said, in a quavering voice and in Chinese more conventional than Wong’s had been, “Born of sky and earth, immortal magically fused. From the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, an old monkey am I.”
Charles fought down his grin. Quite apart from anything else, he was a Belgian hired workman, not someone who would speak Chinese, much less know that Amy was just quoting Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. They had been to see an operatic adaptation not long before the war had broken out, he remembered...
Wong turned back to the palanquin, and managed to show to the guard an expression that implied he was trying to remain impassive, but nonetheless displayed a flicker of alarm. “In the cave of the Water-curtain I ply my home-trade,” he said, “I found a friend and master, who taught me the Great Secret!” Wong turned back to the second guard and cleared his throat, then spoke in his slurring French again. “You must. Let the Lady Dragon Lotus pass...now. You must.” That was the authentic way, Charles thought, no elaborate threats, because a threat would admit to the possibility that the order might not be carried out. Simply an order, mulishly repeated forever.
The guard opened his mouth nervously, but was rescued when a tall, blond man in a black Belgian Major’s uniform arrived. He was the sort who would probably be pulled away into the front lines sooner or later, Charles guessed, but for now the war remained young for Belgium. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked, casually asserting his authority. He had almost certainly already asked the question to the guard, but now directed the question to Wong.
Wong gave him a look. “The Lady Dragon Lotus...must pass,” he said. He paused for a moment, as if thinking for words, and murmured in Chinese. “I made myself perfect in many arts of Immortality, I learned transformations without bound or end.” He spoke again in French. “The Lady must pass...into the land of the Fa-guo-ren barbarians.”
“The Fa...” The Major repeated in accented French, then frowned. “The French?”
“That is what those barbarians may name themselves; it is of no consequence,” Wong said arrogantly.
The Major set his jaw. “You are aware that as of today, the Kingdom of the Reunited Netherlands is at war with China?” he asked sharply.
“I know of no such thing,” Wong said coldly. “There has been no such presumptuous insult received by the court of His Heavenly Majesty the True Emperor, Quanyu, in the greatest city of All-Under-Heaven, Beijing.”
The Major paused. “Ah. You are from Beiqing China, then?” He asked it in a slightly surprised tone, one which Charles had heard before. It was not uncommon for people in western Europe to forget that there were two Chinas. Of course, judging by what the papers said, perhaps there wouldn’t be two Chinas for long: there was talk of the Feng forces closing on what Wong’s character considered to be the greatest city of All-Under-Heaven and shelling its outskirts.
Wong’s eyes narrowed. “The Lady Dragon Lotus is from the court of the True Emperor of the Qing Dynasty,” he said icily. “We need have no...discussion of any unimportant and irrelevant minor rebels in the south.”
The Major gaped at him for a moment, then nodded, a slight smile on his lips. Yes. Yes. It was working, Charles realised excitedly. The Man’s plan had been good. Give the Belgians a stereotype, and that was all they would see. An hour from now, the guards would be able to tell stories in the pub about the absurd anachronism of the arrogant, out-of-touch Chinese majordomo and his mysterious princess, but would likely not even be able to reliably say how many of the locally-recruited white workmen had been holding up the palanquin.
“I see,” the Major said. “You will, however, require travel documents...”
Wong shook his head slightly, then turned to the palanquin. “I tired of the narrow scope afforded by the world of man, nothing could content me but to live in the Green Jade Heaven.”
The hand re-emerged and, despite its impractical nails, pulled back the curtain. Despite himself, Charles couldn’t help but look up as the Major recoiled slightly. Amy sat on her couch with her arms crossed, her arms emerging from the billowing sleeves of her red silk gown. Her face was covered in white makeup, save for her sharply rouged lips. Her hair was done up in an elaborate set of tails that seemed to float on either side of her face. She was beautiful, but it was a cold, artificial beauty, like a doll. A little China doll, with a very real burning heart inside.
She spoke. She did not shout, but there was power in her voice. Charles realised that if she wanted to be, his fiancée could become one of the greatest actresses in the world. “Why should Heaven’s halls have always one master? In earthly dynasties king succeeds king. The strong to the stronger must yield precedence and place! Hero is he alone who vies with powers supreme!”
The words helped, the arrogant and boastful words that Sun Wukong had spoken to the Buddha when he had declared his intent to overthrow the Jade Emperor and set himself, the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, in his place. They fitted Amy’s character. This was a woman whose own faith in her own superiority over the white barbarians would remain completely unshaken, who would believe that bullets themselves would melt and shatter rather than Heaven allow her to be harmed.
The Major had actually taken a step back. “Ah...I see,” he managed, bowled over by this fusillade of incomprehensible Chinese.
Wong almost seemed to take pity on him. “The Lady Dragon Lotus pays you the great honour of addressing you directly, barbarian, an honour decidedly undeserved.” He paused as though thinking of words in French. “Any...required seals and documents...may be located at the redhaired barbarian embassy of Eyu. They whom you name Russians,” he designed to add when the Major looked confused. “The Lady Dragon Lotus is...very close to the Ambassador.”
The Major blinked. Like the guards before him, he was weighing up his options. He was probably imagining what might happen if the Russian Ambassador became upset with Belgium at this point of the war, and he was to blame. Of course, they might be bluffing, but, well, it wasn’t as if some porcelain Chinese princess would exactly be hard to track down, was it? “I...very well,” he managed. “You may pass.”
“The Lady Dragon Lotus will pass,” Wong corrected him, then gestured impatiently to Charles and the other three workmen. “On!” He closed the curtain as the palanquin passed.
The battered Major watched them go, but Charles refused to meet his gaze. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other as they crossed the borderline. Even now, much of the Franco-Belgian border was fortresses, but the city of Zinnik-Soignies had been cut in half by the border after the Popular Wars, and had become a popular centre for both legitimate and less-legitimate trade every since. The city had expanded to fit that trade.
It was not until they had passed the line painted on the ground that Charles breathed a sigh of relief. Moustachioed French customs officers awaited them beneath a French flag, a golden fleur-de-lys on a blue circle on a red-bordered white field. They would also take some convincing. Charles hoped they wouldn’t have to play their trump card this early, but would be able to choose their moment to reveal him to the French Government.
For one of his fellow workmen holding up the palanquin, dressed in cheap Belgian labourers’ outfits, a red Chinese headband around his dirtied face, was in fact The Man. Charles doubted that the Major or the guards had given him a second glance. Something that they might turn out to regret.
For the world knew The Man by a different name: Frederick, Duke of York.
[7] Dephlog-water is the TTL term for hydrogen peroxide (which was briefly called ‘oxidised water’ in OTL when it was first discovered at the end of the eighteenth century).
[8] I.e. dialectal Cantonese; the ‘Authentic’ means as opposed to merely how Cantonese words and usages have influenced the form of Mandarin used for government use in Feng China.
Zinnik-Soignies [Zinnik Side], Kingdom of the Reunited Netherlands [a.k.a. Belgium]
February 22nd 1899
Charles Grey fought with all his might to avoid anxiously looking up as they approached the customs house with its black-striped barrier. While Belgium and France had not been openly at war since before Charles’ father had been born, relations between Brussels and Paris had never been anything more than ‘correct’ since the Route des Larmes and the Malraux Doctrine. Charles knew the period well, as it was the same one that had resulted in his family being effectively turfed out of Britain by the Populists and forced to seek a new fortune from scratch. Out of revenge for the crimes de guerre the Belgians had inflicted on their French-speaking Walloon minority, the French had deliberately supported any and every other possible rival possessor of the former Dutch colonies that the Belgians had tried to claim. Mostly this had meant the exilic Dutch republicans in Batavia and Guyana and the Cape—which, kept alive temporarily by French aid, had eventually then fallen into Meridian orbit via the Hermandad. Greys had played a role there, too: adventurers, soldiers of fortune, in high demand from Dutch colonials who had plenty of money from trade but were short of officers to help resist the Belgian attempts to annex their lands.
Now, Charles suspected, the French government probably thought much the way he as a latter-day Grey did. Belgium wasn’t much, these days, though it might prove enough to tip the balance against the Germans as their military struggled under yet another front opening up. Though the bloodies boasted of Belgium’s alleged spy network, the kingdom wasn’t powerful enough to be a serious threat on the world stage. The Meridians—they whom the French and the Greys had ultimately helped by their actions—were another matter. They were losing this war now, but they remained strong enough to yet prolong it for years more misery. Perhaps.
He shook the thought aside. None of this was relevant. Still, he supposed, looking preoccupied was probably better than looking guilty. His eyes started to flick upwards and he instantly, guiltily, looked aside again. No! Stop it!
It was no good. Charles Grey was many things, but he would never be an actor. It was just as well, then, that this role was decidedly one to be played by a mere extra. He re-settled the rod of the palanquin on his shoulder.
He knew she was there, behind the curtains, reclining on the seat, stunning in a form of coldly artificial beauty. Cheung Amoy. His fiancée, the high-spirited girl from the middle-class suburbs of Hanjing, the confident and determined woman who had stuck by her man in his darkest hour. But not today. Today, she was a princess.
Though they had not had much time since learning that Belgium’s entry into the war was imminent from the Man’s contacts (by mutual agreement, they simply named him ‘the Man’ in conversation lest they be overheard), they had still managed to debate several possible plans. None of them had been anything other than what Charles would have called ‘half-baked’ under better circumstances. But these were the circumstances they had.
Anyway, Amy (as he had always named her) had been a problem in all of them, as had her cousin Cheung Wong, who had accompanied them on the long and difficult sea journey to Europe. Chinese people were not completely unknown in Europe, of course, but they were hardly common enough to fit the bill of ‘unmemorable, generic blank’ that the team needed to create in the minds of the customs guards. They were too exotic.
Amy had had some ideas about that. She could wear smoked glasses to hide her eyes. She could use dephlog-water to dye her hair blonde![7] The Man had vetoed all of this—it was winter, after all, hardly the season for dark glasses. It would only take one customs guard to get slightly suspicious and ask her to remove her glasses.
The problem had been considered further from a number of angles. Could they get away with the idea of having Chinese servants? But no, it was still too unusual. Ironically, the success of Charles’ ancestors (and the French) in neutralising Belgian colonial ambitions meant that there were no Far Eastern Belgian colonies left that might have made people from that region a more commonplace site in the Low Country. A different idea was needed.
In the end, perhaps inevitably, it had come from The Man himself. Many of his lieutenants (who would be escaping through other means, being less watched) were shocked at the idea. But it had appealed to Charles. It had a certain historical resonance to it. Despite what they were asking Amy to do.
And now, here they were. Charles had done many things in this war so far, from fighting the Siamese in a burning jungle to spending months sunk into a coma on the verge of death. But this was something else.
The customs guard raised his eyebrows at Cheung Wong as Amy’s cousin stepped forward, ahead of the palanquin, and gave the guard a look so dismissive that it felt as though the cobblestones beneath his feet should have been scorched. He said something impatiently in Authentic Hangjingese,[8] a tongue which even scholars of the Orient in Brussels were unlikely to understand. Then he theatrically sighed, keeping his face utterly immobile, and switched to halting French. “You...barbarian...gatekeepers...will let the Lady...” He said a name that was a popular but disreputable brand of tooth whitener in Hanjing, and Charles fought to keep a straight face. “In your tongue, the Lady...Dragon Lotus...pass.” Wong looked at the guards as though it was the natural order of the universe that they should step aside. The sun rose in the morning, the tides came in and out, mere barbarian ghost scum should kowtow to the presence of the Lady Dragon Lotus.
The guard took a look at the party. Charles tried to imagine what he was seeing from his own perspective. A Chinese man dressed in a glorious, excessive silk robe, his hair in an elaborate queue, a gigantic emblem on his chest depicting a panda-bear with a Chinese character, a long moustache drooping from beneath his nose and past his thin, disapproving lips. Charles himself had a false moustache stuck beneath his own nose, a decidedly less magnificent one. He was one of four men in labourers’ clothes, save for each bearing a red headband with more Chinese characters on them, one at each corner of the fantastically decorated palanquin. The palanquin was clearly of a European design, bought here and probably adapted from a steam vehicle, but a game attempt had been made to paint and decorate it in the overly ornate Chinese style. The curtains, gold thread tracing the designs of butterflies and birds against their mauve tyrine-dyed base, twitched slightly and a hand languidly emerged, waving impatiently to Wong. The hand bore long, elaborately lacquered nails that would render it useless for almost any task: the mark of one who had servants to call upon for even the most minor of troubles. (Charles hoped desperately those would stay on—there had been no time to actually grow out Amy’s nails, of course, so horn shavings, glued in place and then lacquered, had been hastily substituted).
The first guard muttered something to his colleague in Dutch, not a language that Charles knew. He could instantly tell what was being said, nonetheless, because he could alienistically read their thoughts on their faces. He recognised the situation precisely. This looks like a possibly sticky situation—can’t just let them through, but if I don’t, it might cause an international incident. Best get my superior officer, then he can take the blame.
Indeed, the second guard hurried off. Wong said nothing, but if anything managed to look even more contemptuously at the first guard. From behind the curtain, Amy said, in a quavering voice and in Chinese more conventional than Wong’s had been, “Born of sky and earth, immortal magically fused. From the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, an old monkey am I.”
Charles fought down his grin. Quite apart from anything else, he was a Belgian hired workman, not someone who would speak Chinese, much less know that Amy was just quoting Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. They had been to see an operatic adaptation not long before the war had broken out, he remembered...
Wong turned back to the palanquin, and managed to show to the guard an expression that implied he was trying to remain impassive, but nonetheless displayed a flicker of alarm. “In the cave of the Water-curtain I ply my home-trade,” he said, “I found a friend and master, who taught me the Great Secret!” Wong turned back to the second guard and cleared his throat, then spoke in his slurring French again. “You must. Let the Lady Dragon Lotus pass...now. You must.” That was the authentic way, Charles thought, no elaborate threats, because a threat would admit to the possibility that the order might not be carried out. Simply an order, mulishly repeated forever.
The guard opened his mouth nervously, but was rescued when a tall, blond man in a black Belgian Major’s uniform arrived. He was the sort who would probably be pulled away into the front lines sooner or later, Charles guessed, but for now the war remained young for Belgium. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked, casually asserting his authority. He had almost certainly already asked the question to the guard, but now directed the question to Wong.
Wong gave him a look. “The Lady Dragon Lotus...must pass,” he said. He paused for a moment, as if thinking for words, and murmured in Chinese. “I made myself perfect in many arts of Immortality, I learned transformations without bound or end.” He spoke again in French. “The Lady must pass...into the land of the Fa-guo-ren barbarians.”
“The Fa...” The Major repeated in accented French, then frowned. “The French?”
“That is what those barbarians may name themselves; it is of no consequence,” Wong said arrogantly.
The Major set his jaw. “You are aware that as of today, the Kingdom of the Reunited Netherlands is at war with China?” he asked sharply.
“I know of no such thing,” Wong said coldly. “There has been no such presumptuous insult received by the court of His Heavenly Majesty the True Emperor, Quanyu, in the greatest city of All-Under-Heaven, Beijing.”
The Major paused. “Ah. You are from Beiqing China, then?” He asked it in a slightly surprised tone, one which Charles had heard before. It was not uncommon for people in western Europe to forget that there were two Chinas. Of course, judging by what the papers said, perhaps there wouldn’t be two Chinas for long: there was talk of the Feng forces closing on what Wong’s character considered to be the greatest city of All-Under-Heaven and shelling its outskirts.
Wong’s eyes narrowed. “The Lady Dragon Lotus is from the court of the True Emperor of the Qing Dynasty,” he said icily. “We need have no...discussion of any unimportant and irrelevant minor rebels in the south.”
The Major gaped at him for a moment, then nodded, a slight smile on his lips. Yes. Yes. It was working, Charles realised excitedly. The Man’s plan had been good. Give the Belgians a stereotype, and that was all they would see. An hour from now, the guards would be able to tell stories in the pub about the absurd anachronism of the arrogant, out-of-touch Chinese majordomo and his mysterious princess, but would likely not even be able to reliably say how many of the locally-recruited white workmen had been holding up the palanquin.
“I see,” the Major said. “You will, however, require travel documents...”
Wong shook his head slightly, then turned to the palanquin. “I tired of the narrow scope afforded by the world of man, nothing could content me but to live in the Green Jade Heaven.”
The hand re-emerged and, despite its impractical nails, pulled back the curtain. Despite himself, Charles couldn’t help but look up as the Major recoiled slightly. Amy sat on her couch with her arms crossed, her arms emerging from the billowing sleeves of her red silk gown. Her face was covered in white makeup, save for her sharply rouged lips. Her hair was done up in an elaborate set of tails that seemed to float on either side of her face. She was beautiful, but it was a cold, artificial beauty, like a doll. A little China doll, with a very real burning heart inside.
She spoke. She did not shout, but there was power in her voice. Charles realised that if she wanted to be, his fiancée could become one of the greatest actresses in the world. “Why should Heaven’s halls have always one master? In earthly dynasties king succeeds king. The strong to the stronger must yield precedence and place! Hero is he alone who vies with powers supreme!”
The words helped, the arrogant and boastful words that Sun Wukong had spoken to the Buddha when he had declared his intent to overthrow the Jade Emperor and set himself, the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, in his place. They fitted Amy’s character. This was a woman whose own faith in her own superiority over the white barbarians would remain completely unshaken, who would believe that bullets themselves would melt and shatter rather than Heaven allow her to be harmed.
The Major had actually taken a step back. “Ah...I see,” he managed, bowled over by this fusillade of incomprehensible Chinese.
Wong almost seemed to take pity on him. “The Lady Dragon Lotus pays you the great honour of addressing you directly, barbarian, an honour decidedly undeserved.” He paused as though thinking of words in French. “Any...required seals and documents...may be located at the redhaired barbarian embassy of Eyu. They whom you name Russians,” he designed to add when the Major looked confused. “The Lady Dragon Lotus is...very close to the Ambassador.”
The Major blinked. Like the guards before him, he was weighing up his options. He was probably imagining what might happen if the Russian Ambassador became upset with Belgium at this point of the war, and he was to blame. Of course, they might be bluffing, but, well, it wasn’t as if some porcelain Chinese princess would exactly be hard to track down, was it? “I...very well,” he managed. “You may pass.”
“The Lady Dragon Lotus will pass,” Wong corrected him, then gestured impatiently to Charles and the other three workmen. “On!” He closed the curtain as the palanquin passed.
The battered Major watched them go, but Charles refused to meet his gaze. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other as they crossed the borderline. Even now, much of the Franco-Belgian border was fortresses, but the city of Zinnik-Soignies had been cut in half by the border after the Popular Wars, and had become a popular centre for both legitimate and less-legitimate trade every since. The city had expanded to fit that trade.
It was not until they had passed the line painted on the ground that Charles breathed a sigh of relief. Moustachioed French customs officers awaited them beneath a French flag, a golden fleur-de-lys on a blue circle on a red-bordered white field. They would also take some convincing. Charles hoped they wouldn’t have to play their trump card this early, but would be able to choose their moment to reveal him to the French Government.
For one of his fellow workmen holding up the palanquin, dressed in cheap Belgian labourers’ outfits, a red Chinese headband around his dirtied face, was in fact The Man. Charles doubted that the Major or the guards had given him a second glance. Something that they might turn out to regret.
For the world knew The Man by a different name: Frederick, Duke of York.
[7] Dephlog-water is the TTL term for hydrogen peroxide (which was briefly called ‘oxidised water’ in OTL when it was first discovered at the end of the eighteenth century).
[8] I.e. dialectal Cantonese; the ‘Authentic’ means as opposed to merely how Cantonese words and usages have influenced the form of Mandarin used for government use in Feng China.
And does he have ten thousand men to march up and down a hill?
Redcoat
Banned
Never heard of it sorry
Hmmmmm we need to find out what wars are coming in the future. *Something* is going to happen in the 20s to make Societism the true adversary of the free world, there's the Silent War which is obviously a reference to the Cold War....and the Sunrise War, whose name suggest that nukes are going to be used. Anything else that anyone could gleam from the text?
There were hints to various "Black Scares", which I'm assuming is the Societist versions of the OTL "Red Scares" in previous updates.
Alex Richards
Donor
Ironic really that it should be a Hanoverian British Royal seeking aid in France.
Ok, so I'm seeing two major trends in this war:
- the Hermandad is losing in Asia, the Pacific and the Americas
- Germany is about to get pumelled by Russia, Scandinavia, and Belgium
I find it interesting that the known Societist countries are the Combine, which forms out of the defeated Hermandad, and Danubia and whatever the Ottoman Empire develops into (IIRC - I'd have to look it up) who are both allies of Germany. It looks like the losers of the war on both sides are going to go Societist while the winners (on both sides) will become Diversitarian. Just realized that we need to think of such a global war not as having one winning and one losing side but different sides winning and losing in different theatres.
- the Hermandad is losing in Asia, the Pacific and the Americas
- Germany is about to get pumelled by Russia, Scandinavia, and Belgium
I find it interesting that the known Societist countries are the Combine, which forms out of the defeated Hermandad, and Danubia and whatever the Ottoman Empire develops into (IIRC - I'd have to look it up) who are both allies of Germany. It looks like the losers of the war on both sides are going to go Societist while the winners (on both sides) will become Diversitarian. Just realized that we need to think of such a global war not as having one winning and one losing side but different sides winning and losing in different theatres.