Europe in Autumn

He had begun to wonder why he was a Coureur. Some do it for the money, some do it because it offers their lives a little harmless adventure. Fabio didn’t know any longer.

The train rocked and rolled slowly through grubby little industrial towns. The Fall of the Wall was just a distant misty memory now, but Eastern Europe still needed a good scrub and a lick of paint. Some of Poland’s most polluted towns had buildings of mediaeval splendour, but they were all crusted with centuries of soot.

The big thing in Europe these days was countries, and there were more and more of them every year. The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up

These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted Les Coureurs, and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which na

While the Poles and the Hindenbergers squabbled, telephone and data cable lines were tapped or cut altogether and radio, television and satellite frequencies were scrambled. Nobody living within five kilometres of the Polish side of the frontier could watch television or use any kind of wifi.

“Consider Hindenberg, for example,” said Dariusz. “What must that have been like? You go to bed in Wrocław, and you wake up in Breslau. What must that have been like?” Except that it hadn’t happened overnight. What had happened to Wrocław and Opole and the little towns and villages inbetween had taken a long, bitter time, and if you followed the ne

THE INDEPENDENT SILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław (formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of… etc, etc) and the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea. Poland, having been forced by the EU, UN and NATO to accede to an ethnic Silesian

“Purpose of visit?” asked the Hindenberger. “I’m on holiday.” The official looked at him with an expression of mild astonishment. He checked his screen again. “Estonian.” “Yes.” The Hindenberger shook his head slightly. “I only get a week’s holiday a year,” Rudi told him. “I’m a chef. If I take any time off my boss has to employ an agency chef.” Th

The checkpoint kiosks looked as if they had been brought in from car parks, had inadequately-adapted vehicle radars and infra-red scanners and barcode readers mounted on their roofs, and then been staffed by a hurriedly-conscripted border guard. In common with many immature polities, great pains had been taken with the uniform of the Border Guard.