The park was separated from the docks by a stone balustrade. Along this someone had deployed a banner reading, in English: “Welcome Queen of Netherworld!”
Saskia well knew how to spot the differences between signs that really had been improvised on kitchen tables by amateurs, and ones carefully fashioned to seem that way. This was one of the latter. Nor did it escape her notice that when Michiel—who had vaulted up out of his beautiful runabout onto the quay—stepped forward to offer his hand as she stepped off the pontoon, it all happened with that banner in the background. So the image was all over the world before her foot touched what passed in Venice for dry land.
She had never before encountered that usage of the word “Netherworld,” but she got it. Nederland—her kingdom until this morning—was a land that happened to be low. From a parochial Northern European standpoint it was the low country and so that was what people had always called it. From a global perspective,
though, it was just one of many places where people lived close to sea level; and though, a hundred years ago, all such places would have seemed quite different—as different as Venice was from Houston or Zeeland from Bangladesh—when sea level began to rise, they all turned out to have much in common. A whole planet-spanning archipelago of threatened nether-places. Why not “Netherworld”？ Whether it really needed to have a queen, though, was another question.
It was understood that she’d had a long day and so formalities at quayside were kept to a minimum: Saskia accepted a bouquet and an official greeting from the mayor as well as one from the leader of an entity called Vexital. After waving to the crowd and posing for a few photos she climbed into Michiel’s sleek mahogany runabout and enjoyed a rousing dash across the Lagoon to a private island.
Dozens of tiny islands were strewn across the water around Venice, each with its own long history of use as a monastery, convent, prison, dump, cemetery, or fortification. Many were uninhabited and unused, a fact remarkable to Saskia, who would have expected that a charming private island only a few minutes’ powerboat ride from the Grand Canal would be a hot property. The fact that they were all in danger of ceasing to exist had probably depressed the market. The one they were going to was less than a hundred meters wide. It was square except for an indentation on one side for a dock. Saskia had banked over this island a few minutes ago and got a good look out the side window of the plane. It was outlined on three of its sides by old buildings that had once served as the wings of a cloister. In medieval times those had risen directly from the water of the Lagoon, but sea level rise had forced the owners to expand the island’s footprint slightly by dumping fill into the shallow water to build up a surrounding levee. Resulting environmental controversies had become a political flash point in a way that was suspiciously useful to Vexital: a local movement dedicated to the proposition that Venice ought to secede, not just from Europe （“Vexit”） but from Italy （“Vexitalia”）。
Venice itself, at less than four miles long, would seem so small that it was superfluous to have a microcosm of it; but Santa Liberata, as this island was known, had been seen as just that. Cornelia, its owner, had appeared in a very well produced video sloshing barefoot down flooded corridors of its ancient cloisters, gazing sadly down through six inches of water at beautiful mosaics, and looking up at frescoes soon to be dissolved by rising seawater.
Anyway, Liberata was safe and sound for the moment behind those new levees, thrown up in defiance of the European Union’s Infraction Procedure. The family of Cornelia had done a brilliant job of fixing the place up one bit at a time, bringing some rooms up to modern luxury-hotel standards while leaving others in exactly the right stage of dusty, weedy, comfortable decay. So upon her arrival Saskia was able to freshen up in a bathroom that sported sleek high-tech chrome-plated plumbing fixtures she couldn’t even work out how to use; but then she was able to walk out onto a patio lit up by a red Pina2bo sunset and have a drink on thousand-year-old flagstones with Daia Kaur Chand.
“So, Your Royal Highness, what’s it like to be an ex-queen?”
Wonderful was on Saskia’s lips, but she held back. The last time she’d been in Daia’s company was on the Flying S Ranch. Then Daia hadn’t been working in her capacity as a journalist but tagging along with her husband, the lord mayor. This time, it was different. The conversation they were having now was off the record. But it was still a sort of dress rehearsal for the real interview they’d be conducting tomorrow with a full BBC production crew in attendance. So it would be wise for Saskia to get in the habit of being a little guarded. “It’s nice to be relieved of some of those responsibilities,” she allowed, “but of course Queen Charlotte—who has shouldered them in my place—is never far from my mind.”