Queens have never been seen to run, at least not in public, though it
is quite possible that the MarkII or MarkIII participated in private otter
hunting, accompanied by the obligatory swarm of scent hounds, or
maybe indulged in some light hare coursing in the wake of packs of
noble sight hounds, though in the latter case it is more probable she
was mounted on some suitable tetrapod to avoid the exertions of fast
running through the rough. There may even be archived footage. I
can imagine rather grainy scenes of the tweed covered monarch fleet
footed in pursuit of whole romps of lutrae, one moment up to her
oxters in their watery environment and the next clambering
quadrupedally, robust but unreginal, up the banks of mazy
waterways, her enjoyment of the deadly pursuit unshaken by tracts of
half frozen mud and fields of marshy sedge. After the kill I can see
her standing flushed and radiant with the exercise, glancing at the
corpses as she converses in animated silence with the master of the
pack, accepts and fails to light a cigarette. Only the MarkVI herself
could confirm the existence of such records. I wondered now whether
she might be drawing on those memories for inspiration.
We began to move in a direction that I assumed would lead us to the
console; our haste expressed more intensely in our emotions than in
physical progress. The MarkVI, it must be remembered, was garbed
as the personification of the British Isles, a type of enrobement in
perfect harmony with serious ritual occasions and the quasi
ecclesiastical moments that go with high tea on the moors, but utterly
unsuitable for a foot chase through unknown spatial areas. I made a
feeble offer to hold her cloak, for this was the garment that
encumbered her upper body the most, but there was simply nothing I
could do about her gown which had been cut following the model of
those extra voluminous curtains, whose day came too late to save
Polonius, and whose coils now imperilled her progress. Was the earth
to be torched and over four and a half billion years of exhausting,
unremitting labour to be wiped out in a matter of moments all because
of a type of sartorial soft furnishing? Improbable as I would have
thought this to have been only a few minutes before, such a dreadful
possibility now loomed as large as a gas giant in the face of an
impacting comet. And Pestit ratcheted up the tension still further by
reminding the MarkVI of her regalia.
'One may be either fleet or well-protected, one cannot be both!' the
