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    Queen of Shadows
    Queen of Shadows
    Queen of Shadows
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Queen of Shadows

    By Bill Etem

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    About this ebook

    'Queen of Shadows' is about a group of mercenaries who decamp from England and venture into rebellious Scotland. They embark on a perilous mission to identify, infiltrate, subvert and destroy any anti-English factions they find in the northern parts of the UK.

    It's a parallel universe sort of tale, hardly naturalistic fiction in the mode of a Dreiser or even a Le Carre. I follow more after John Buchan's style of fiction, I mean, with Buchan you don't have a long build-up of monotonous details which eventually unfold before the reader's eyes into a great artistic masterpiece. Plus Buchan is pretty well-mannered and genteel, respectable and clean-cut.

    Obviously fans of porn and erotica will be bored with my brand of fiction. So if you are looking for hot steamy pornographic action then this book is nothing you'd be interested in. I suppose this book is too Victorian for the young adult market as well. The schools and the culture in general have really gone full heathen. Certainly the public school libraries here in the USA have lots of books full of explicit sex for 12-year-olds to read. Say, for instance, your daughter has fallen in love with some boy. And if she is sort of ugly, or perhaps somewhat hot and not at all ugly, well, she will want to make sure that a super hot girl at school doesn't come along and steal her boyfriend away from her. So she can go to the school library. And there she can study up on all sorts of sexual techniques to keep her man satisfied. Unlike in former decades, she doesn't have to leave the suburbs and go to an adult book store in some sleazy crime-ridden part of the inner city to learn how to use her body to get what she wants. The heathen public schools can supply kids with heathen books and heathen manuals. But a heathen girl of today also needs role models who will be patient with her, who will really take the time to show her the ways that she can use her body to get what she wants.

    What do you think, too much sarcasm or not enough?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Etem
    Release dateJun 14, 2018
    ISBN9780463332054
    Queen of Shadows
    Author

    Bill Etem

    Bill EE-tem. Born in Minneapolis, 1. 2.60. Living in St. Paul. Had lots of jobs: High School math teacher, football coach, track coach, legal coding / data entry, production, bar bouncer etc., etc. Bounced around some myself. Lived in Mexico for 20 months, in Oaxaca. Lived in Los Angeles for a few years. Lived in Minnesota, Colorado and South Dakota while growing up. Traveled for 4 months round Europe after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1983, B.A. in Mathematics. My fiction often deals with kids who find themselves trapped in dangerous circumstances. They'll just have to brave and resourceful to escape their predicaments. "Constitutional History of the Western World" has over 500,000 words in it and is filled with important info but it's not exactly succinct. I haven't looked at "The Archangel Michael vs. the Antichrist" in years. "The ABCs of Christianity" is more or less up-to-date. "Glamour Scammers" is my most up-to-date book that is succinct. "Guilty Pleasures" and "Rock Island" try to explain my main points in creative ways. My religious books argue that Christianity is true, Jesus is God, the Divine Son. But we have a big problem in that the Christian scriptures are clear there is only one True Church, only one Bride of Christ. And yet there are thousands of separate churches / thousands of unique denominations in the world. So this a big conspicuous problem! It's like you are a detective at a crime scene, and you're staring at some clues, but if your main ideas about how the crime went down are contradicted by the most obvious pieces of evidence, then you got a big problem. You know, if you find a corpse with a knife in her back and a cigarette by her head, and if you determine she died from smoking... We got scriptures which say there is only one True Church, and we got thousands of separate churches / thousands of unique denominations in the world... Some definitions: If a Church leads people to Heaven then she is the Bride of Christ, the True Church, the Church Christ founded on a rock, Matthew 16. 13-19. If a church is lost in heresy and drags people down to eternal perdition then that church is what is known as a false church. How do you find the True Church? I have some books which deal with that question.

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      Book preview

      Queen of Shadows - Bill Etem

      Queen of Shadows

      Published by Bill Etem at Smashwords

      Copyright 2018 Bill Etem

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Cover art by Dora Gonzales

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1. The Plantagenet Tavern.

      Chapter 2. Femmes Fatales.

      Chapter 3. Meeting the Queen Again.

      Chapter 4. Hadrian’s Wall.

      Chapter 5. Insertion into Scotland.

      Chapter 6. Moves and Counter-Moves.

      Chapter 7. The English Invasion of Ireland.

      Queen of Shadows

      Chapter 1. The Plantagenet Tavern.

      It has been a queer sort of autumn, I dare say, wildly eccentric weather. For a few days it was sultry and tropical, hellish really, but for the last few weeks now the north of England has been as icy as Siberia. The glorious warmth and golden glow of what had been a delightful lingering summer first degenerated into suffocating heat, and now there’s this wretched, interminable polar hell. The change from hot to cold came so suddenly that it gives one hope, perhaps not unjustifiably, that the tropical heat will return just as suddenly.

      Something else changed rather abruptly. My freedom. Sir Hugh Menzies is the name. I spent a decade in the Secret Service reserves where I didn’t have to risk my neck at all, not once that I can remember. But all that has now changed with my called-up to active duty. Received the mobilization order just over a week ago. A young corporal called at my estate in Northumberland to deliver in person my marching orders. I was handed a slip of paper which told me to report to army HQ in York. 9 days ago was my final day as free man. And now perhaps years of toil, danger and drudgery await me as a soldier under orders in this medieval militaristic system which now prevails over England.

      Yes, Sir Hugh Menzies, 47, bachelor, a colonel in Her Majesty’s secret service, am once again on the front lines. Let me give you a little review of what’s unfolding here. First, there was a brief meeting in York with my commanding officer, Sir Tobias Norbert-Jones. Nothing of terribly great import was discussed, aside from the fact that I was ordered to move south, ordered to be in London as soon as possible.

      Well, roughly a week elapsed before I actually arrived in London. Why the delay? Let’s see, first off, I was set upon by a gang of bloodthirsty brigands. I escaped the killers, providentially and just barely, after a perilous ride over the moors. My poor horse, sad to report, had a heart attack and expired after giving his supreme effort in the flight from the brigands. I then had to scramble on foot through the brush and brambles and over some hillocks in my own supreme effort to escape the cut-throats. Fortune smiled upon me, as I panted and sweated, as I threw myself into the concealing cover of a midlands forest. Rather like the young man who would become King Charles II., when he took refuge in an oak tree while fleeing Cromwell’s army, I scrambled up the low hanging boughs of a maple and hid amid white snow covering a blaze of orange and gold autumnal color. The hounds had lost the fox. Sir Hugh held on to his life, lived to fight another day, and also held on to his wallet stuffed with money. I might have bought myself another horse, but rumors abounded – I dined in taverns at least once a day - all I heard was hear no end of gossip saying the highways were infested with thieves and murderers - so-and-so was robbed here, someone else was robbed and murdered over yonder etc. Can’t really didn’t see the wisdom of traveling on roads infested with outlaws. Why risk it? I needed to take the slow safe route. Besides, I wasn’t given a precise definite deadline ordering me to be in London by or before a specific date and time.

      Anyway, I disguised myself as a day-labourer, sported the typical dusty outfit, unkempt hair, boots well-bespattered with rustic mire. Wasn’t too hard to look impoverished as I struck out cross-country, horseless and on foot, venturing over the fields, forests and meadows of England, travelling during the daylight hours and sleeping at night under the stars, with just a fire and some wool blankets for warmth.

      Reaching the northern suburbs of London at last I was astonished by the reek of it all, by the stench of horse and cattle and pig manure. Of course, for a few decades now, central London has been rather like a huge version of Venice, what with the inundation of the North Sea into the Thames valley. In recent years Her Majesty’s government has had many big nuclear reactors running in Antarctica, big reactors which are generating the energy required to run the pumps which are lifting billions of gallons of seawater every minute, lifting them thousands of meters vertically, and pushing them hundreds of kilometers horizontally, spilling billions of gallons of seawater every minute over the frigid interior of Antarctica. Huge ice mountains and vast frozen saltwater plateaus have been built for the last 50 years in Antarctica, built by the British, the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Muricans, the Canadians, the Brazilians, the Argentines etc. Of course other parts of the Antarctic ice cap, the parts hard by the almost tropical waters of the Southern Ocean, are still melting away at a prodigious rate. Nevertheless, the sea level is now being lowered at a rate of 1 meter per century, albeit large sections of London are still 2 meters below sea level. But progress of any sort is nothing to sneer at. The gondoliers’ guilds are of course angry about the retreating waters, angry in London, New York, Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, Quebec, Montreal, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Rio, Mumbai, Singapore, Shanghai, Perth, Sydney, Gold Coast, Barcelona, Stockholm, Hamburg etc., etc., but those negative Nancys and Debbie downers, like everyone else, will just have to either adapt or die.

      The strange thing is that the Global Warming / Climate Change doctrines pushed by George Monbiot, Greta Thunberg, Peter Jackson, AOC, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joe Biden etc., etc., 2 centuries ago, were debunked as soon as they were formulated. But these huge ice mountains were built anyway, queer thing that. And now the earth’s orbit is all out of whack what with, over the last fifty years, the construction of these huge ice mountains in Antarctica, each hundreds of thousands

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