ANGELIQUE

BY CHRISTOPHER TOILKIEN

[ part 1 ]

Angelique was startled from a sound sleep by her nurse Karia rolling her up in the silken coverlet and hoisting her tiny body over the strong shoulder of Karia’s mountain tribe body. She attempted to cry out, but Karia’s firm hand, toughed by a life of toil, was firmly covering it. "Hush child, the army has rebelled against you fathers even handed rule. I do not know how long my Kinsmen who form the palace guard, can hold out"

As they dashed from her room just below the onion dome of the "Princess" tower, rattling gunfire broke out. Karia changed direction in mid stride, and ran along the corridor with the stone screen looked over courtyard of the Seraglio. Just as they passed it, an explosion shattered the screen sending its delicate centuries old fretwork into the corridor. Karia ran down the corner stairs to ground level started to cross the seraglio foyer when an even larger explosion blew in the iron bound wooden doors.

Through the smoke and flames came men dressed in the desert camouflage of the army. Karia tried to dash past them, but a burst of gunfire tore into her fleeing back. Still moving at full speed her body slammed into the wall at the end of the main corridor, stunning her little charge.

Angelique awoke the pain in her arms dragging her back into the world that was to be her new reality.

She was back in her virgin white plastered room below the onion dome of the Princess tower. But now instead of lying on the soft cushions, she now hung by her wrists in the center of the room from one of the white painted horizontal iron beams that supported the roof. Gunfire still occasionally rang out and the smell of its smoke came to her nostrils.

Her hands had lost their feeling and her shoulders felt as if they would tear out of their sockets. Sweat ran down her nude body and dripping off her tiny feet formed a pool on the marble floor beneath her. Tears had come, run down her cheeks, dried, and she ignored the grumbling of her empty stomach.

Then her ironbound door slammed open and General Timatt walked in.

"Timmy" Angelique cried out. "You saved the royal family"

"Actually little Princess, I have come to end it" He replied raising the pistol in his hand, walking right up to her and pointing it at her head.

"That would not be a good idea Timatt" A male voice came from behind him.

Her whirled, gun still pointing at her head. "And why not ex royal Vizier" Her inquired.

"Be cause the right to rule in this country has always descended through the females in the royal house" He replied. "And she is the last surviving one"

Angelique cried out and her eyes crowded with tears at his words that were so callously bandied about. Her mother and both elder sisters were obviously dead if she was the last female in her line.

"Shut up bitch" He said turning around and slapping her across the face.

"Round up the elders in the capital and bring them here" He p ordered. "She will stay alive as long as they obay my orders"

"And the rest of the army and the mountain tribes?" The Vizier inquired.

"When the up front money arrives from the foreigners who backed me" He informed the old man. "In order to get the right to the natural gas well under the sands of the dried up sea that forms half the central part of our poor country" He continued. "There will be enough money to bribe them into accepting my rule"

"And our nebours?" The Vizier asked.

"With twenty percent of the worlds known natural gas reserves within a short pipeline away" He grinned. "They will soon forget who used to rule here"

The vizier bowed low and left, as the door closed behind him Timatt turned his attention to the helpless nude little girl hanging before him.

"You know I could get used to fucking a royal princess" He calmly informed her. "But I would really enjoy even more stripping the skin off your body" He threatened as he slipped a very large combat knife down her almost flat chest, fortunately blade edge outward for now.

Angelique whimpered and her lips trembled, but she promised herself she would never beg this traitor for mercy.

Then he surprised her by reaching up and cutting the rope that suspended her helplessly in front of him. She landed on her feet that would no longer support her and she simply fell in a boneless heap at his feet.

He reached down, grabbed her long red hair and lifted her terror filled face to his. "I am going to cut your hands free and lock you in here until I gather the capitals rich and powerful to formally announce the success of my democratic revolution tomorrow morning" He growled. "Get yourself cleaned up and tomorrow morning get dressed up so that I can display you "

Then let go, and she wordlessly slid down to a little pile at his feet again.

He then reached down and slit the ropes binding her hands in front of her, turned and left the sobbing girl all alone.

Eventually she crawled across the fifty-foot diameter tower that had been her home for her entire life into the bathroom and managed to start water filling into the sunken bath. She then reached up to the toilet bowl and lifting the lid retched until her stomach held no more, and the subsequent cramps almost made it impossible to stand. Tears streaming and still sobbing she managed to stagger over to the bath and slid her thin body in.

Twice she let herself slip under the warm water, but each time she came up sputtering eventually. Drowning herself in her own bath obviously would not work. So she dragged herself out and searched her bathroom for a razor, but then remembered her servants had always brought them with them when they attended on her toilet.

She realized for all her life, here in the palace, someone had always done just about everything for her, except in the summerhouse up in the mountains, where the royal family lived a much less privileged existence.

Pills, but their were none. Only the family’s private physician had ever treated her, and everything came and went in his great black bag. By now she had decided to escape and maybe make her way into the mountains were the families’ nurses and personal bodyguards had traditionally been drawn from.

The unlocking of her door made her shiver with fear and she quickly drew a bathrobe over her slim body. Slowly walking back into her room, she saw three hulking soldiers, one wearing the insignia indicating he was a major.

"I wonder if he changed his mind about keeping me alive?" Angelique thought to herself. "If he had there was simply nothing she could do about it, but die with dignity"

Two of them moved either side of her, grab her slim wrists and lifted her up until she hung before the officer. He walked up and undid her bathrobe running his rough hands over her slim preteen body.

"When he is through with you, I’ll keep you alive as long as you please me" He smiled.

But she could see in his eyes that she would not last long under his thumb, her mother had taught her daughter well how to read an opponent.

"Traitor" She spat, and received a slap in the face for her defiance.

"Timatt will enjoy thrashing the defiance out of your hide" He snarled. "And I will ensure I am around to watch you beg for your life"

He then signaled his men who simply let her go and she fell on the floor at his feet.

"Your meal, Princess" He then informed her, and stepped back revealing a large bowl sitting on the floor right where she had hung by her wrists. "Make it last, you never know how long you have until the next one" He chortled.

And then they were gone locking her door behind them.

Angelique crawled around to the bowl to pick it up. Her body was simply too abused to stand, and her mind too shocked to function anywhere above v basic subsistence level. Its contence did not look noshes, nor very appealing for that matter. Then she realized it was a can of dog food mixed with a can of soup to give it some taste.

But it was all there was, so she simply sat down on the low couch that was her bed and ate her fill with her fingers and washed it down with water from the tap in the bathroom.

She then curled up and fell to sleep exhausted.

It was dark when Angelique awoke, her body stiff and sore. She hobbled to the washroom and after using the toilet washed her face. The tired sad face that looked back out at her from the gold trimmed mirror raised a sob, but also made up her mind for her. She would attempt to escape rather than be a helpless pawn and eventually his disposable fuck toy. She then rummaged in her closet to find the darkest clothing she had, and after slipping on a tracksuit and a pair of black sneakers. But she was on the top story of a four-story tower designed to keep the youngest female in the royal family safe from harm and the door was the only exit. But no one had designed it as prison to keep her in.

The six windows were narrow set into the four-foot thick walls with seats set at each side. Narrow, but the windows opened inward and the opening too small for anyone to slip in. Unless it was the razor, thin body of a very determined little girl. She looked out of each and picked the one that was over the flat roof above the Seraglio’s main entrance. There was no more sounds out their than normal, actually it was quieter. She walked back to her linen closet and pulled out all the bed sheets she could find, tying them together as she had seen in some movie.

Angelique tied a small brass urn to one end and lowered it out the window, but it came up short of the roof and she had no more sheets after tying it around the foot of her nearby bed. With nothing to loose, she squirmed out the window scraping her hips on the sill. She turned around jamming her shoulders in the windowsill, grabbed the sheet with all her strength, and lowered herself out into thin air. Her legs wrapped around the sheet and after waiting an eternity, leg go with her hands. She gradually lowered herself down the bed sheet, wishing she had remembered the knots they had tied in the sheet when she was halfway down.

She finally felt the pot with her feet and then lowered herself until she hung, still a few feet above the roof. When she felt her arms start to cramp, she let go and landed with a thump on the flat roof. She crouched there but no one appeared to have heard anything. Angelique looked over the roof and saw two guards lounging in a jeep outside the main entrance below her. So she reached up and pulled herself up onto the flat edge of the large domed that formed the main roof of the Seraglio and scampered along it all the way around the back to where the kitchen was. There she dropped down first on to the main roof and then the lower one of the kitchen. Still no one appeared after her.

She looked over the roof, but there was no lights on, but she had snuck into the kitchen for a snack once and a while. And knew the back door led to a small courtyard with a fence gate she could easily climb and metal garbage bins she could hide in. So over the to where a metal drain angled down to a cistern. She slipped her legs over and worked her way down hand over hand. At the bottom she looked around in the darkness, and stumbled over a soft object in the darkness. She tried to stand but when she tried to move found she was on a pile of soft something’s, she reached down and felt a hand, then an arm, her hand coming up close to her face covered with clotted blood.

Just then, the moon came out from behind a cloud and Angelique screamed. She was standing on a pile of dead bodies, the wall behind her riddled with bullet holes. And just in front of her, the forms of her father and mother face up, bodies covered in bloody holes.

Lights came on all around her and soldiers rushed into the courtyard from the kitchen and outside the fence. They stood, rifles drawn pointed at her until General Timatt arrived.

"It appears the last of the Royal Family wants to join them" He said to the smirking soldiers all around her. "So I guess we will obey her orders and give her what she wants for the very last time"

"Firing squad form up" He ordered, and ten soldiers lined up in front of her, rifles pointing at her as she stood ramrod straight, tears running down her face. Right in front of them, ready to join her family in the mound of murdered dead all around her.

"Fire" He barked and she heard the rifles go off.