A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (10 page)

He sniffs back something thick and wet, swallows, and says, “You want somethin’ to eat?”

Bronwyn is unable to speak, so, after a moment’s awkward silence, Wittenoom does. “What do you have?” he asks.

“We only got one thing”, the owner replies, using a stubby finger to fish about in one large nostril, but the digit doesn’t seem long enough to reach whatever he is after. “The Special.”

“I wish I wasn’t so hungry,” the princess whispers to the captain, as the fat man pulls his finger from his nose with an audible
plock
and wipes a long smear on his apron. Basseliniden acts as though he hadn’t heard her and says to the owner: “The Special sounds fine. We’ll take three.”

“Three Specials?” repeats the fat man, looking a little surprised. “If you say so.” With a sound as though he were gargling a thick motor oil, the proprietor hawks something up from the depths of his larynx . . . perhaps the larynx itself, who can tell? He pulls a glass jar from beneath his apron and unscrews the cap. It is half-filled with a semigelatinous mass of assorted pastel colors. He spits the contents of his mouth into the jar and replaces the lid. He notices the almost hypnotized gaze of his customers and says, a little defensively, “Waste not, want not.”

He disappears behind the curtain. Bronwyn can hear muffled words, as though an argument are taking place, then an expression of surprise and laughter. Of all the explanations that cross her mind, the least likely is what actually is taking place.

“What do you think we should do now?” she asks the captain. “I’ve never been to this part of Tamlaght in my whole life, but I know from my reading that it’s a pretty trackless wilderness. The countryside is very primitive.”

“More primitive than this?” asks the professor.

“It’s the primitive people that worry me,” replies Basseliniden.

“Why?” asks the princess. “It’s hardly possible that they can know who we are. Even if Payne sent out notices everywhere, and he would never have expected us to wind up on the south coast anyway, it would still be difficult to communicate with this region. I doubt if anyone here can even read, anyway. They can hardly have heard of the sailing of the fleet, let alone the effect of the storm.”

“I wasn’t really thinking of those particular dangers.”

“What then . . . “ she begins, but is interrupted by the reappearance of the café’s proprietor as he reenters the room, carrying a large tray upon which are several earthenware bowls and plates.

“What’s that smell?” Bronwyn whispers to the captain.

“I believe it’s the Special.”

An apprehensive expression begins to grow upon his face.

The fat man places a shallow bowl in front of the princess. It contains something soft, black and glistening, a little like stewed raisins with the stems left on. It has an acrid, acid-like smell that Bronwyn notices is by no means the main constituent of the odor that now fills the room.

“What is this?” she asks, almost immediately regretting the question.

“Spiders.”

“What?”

“It’s all we got.”

He sets a small, cracked pitcher of a crusty yellow liquid on the table.

“Got some cream for ‘em, though.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” she mutters, slumping back into her chair.

“This,” says the captain, pointing to his own bowl, which, in spite of what the meaning of having a “special” has implied, contains something entirely different than Bronwyn’s, “looks like something a cow coughed up.”

“Yezzir. Fresh this mornin’.”

Both the princess and the captain glance at the professor, who up until this moment had hardly uttered more than a few words. A silence he continues, more or less. Less, if one considers the indiscreet but, under the circumstances, forgiveable slurpings, smackings and suckings as he singlemindedly consumes his meal.

“What’s he eating?” asks the princess.

“Do you want to reconsider,” asks the captain, “how much you really want to know the answer to that question?”

“Yes, I do. Forget it.”

At that moment, there is a crash at the door, which bursts inward, almost torn from its limp hinges. Four or five formidably burly-looking men enter, spreading immediately and obviously with some practice to either side of the opening, effectively flanking the trio’s table. They are the largest human beings the princess has seen since she had last seen Thud, and the least intelligent-looking since she had last seen her brother. If they resemble anything at all in her own experience, it would have been the bear that had nearly mauled her to death, had the bear been stuffed by an amateur and stored in a damp cellar for ten or fifteen years.

“This them?” the burliest asks, pointing.

“Surely,” replies the fat man. “D’you see anyone else here?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Slinpooker!”

“Aw, get about your bizness and stop tryin’ to scare me.”

“I’ll tell the magistrate about this, Slinpooker!” the burly man growls through his matted beard.

“Go ahead, I got things I kin tell ‘im, too.”

This gets only an inarticulate glower in return, which is lost on the fat man, he having turned away with his last words and is now nonchalantly redistributing the grease on a table with the end of his apron.

The burly man shakes his head, as it dawns upon him that he has momentarily strayed from his purpose. The frustrated wrath that he is unable to loose upon the proprietor he now unleashes upon Bronwyn and her companions.

“You! There! Yir t’come wit me!”

“Why?” Bronwyn asks.

“It’s not yir place t’ask ‘why?’, yir just got t’git up an’ come wit me!”

“We’re not done eating yet.”

“Yes,” adds Basseliniden. “Come back in, what would you say, ah, Hazel, ten minutes?”

“Fifteen minutes would be better. I might decide to have a second helping.”

“A cup of coffee might be nice, too.”

“I ain’t got no coffee,” puts in the proprietor, not looking up from his work. His apron has become glued to a table by something and he is having difficulty unsticking it.

“He ain’t got no coffee,” growls the burly man. “And you’ll have plenny a time t’eat in jail.”

“Jail?” says the princess. “Why are we going to jail?”

“Cause th’ magistrate sez you are, that’s why!” the man shouts, triumphing in his logic. “And,” he continues, capping his argument unassailably, “cuz me an’ my friends here
sez
you are.”

Bronwyn can see the force of this argument and has no reason to doubt that her companions are in equally circumspect agreement, until Basseliniden leaps to his feet, knocking his chair over in the process. She is horrified to hear him say, “I’m only interested in hearing what you have to say because it amazes me every time you open your mouth that you can talk.”

“
Captain
!” she manages to hiss, in spite of the lack of sibilants. He ignores her.

“What did you say?” asks the biggest of the brutes, his dull piggy eyes narrowmg, looking like buckshot sinking into thumb-sized mounds of raw bread dough.

“Am I being too difficult? Are the words too big? Shall I simplify?”

“Er, yeah.”

“I’m not interested in what you and your half-wit brothers have to say, so piss off. Clear enough?”

“Yeah, that’s clear enough. Boys, this fella’s aimin’ t’ commit suicide. Why don’t ya ‘blige ‘im?”

His companions do not answer in so many words, assuming they could have, but their dull eyes suddenly gain a sparkle of feral interest that chills Bronwyn to the marrow.

“Basseliniden,” she says, as calmly as she can. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m not going with them, ah,
Hazel,”
he says with emphasis to remind her that she had used his real name.

“What do you mean, you’re not going with them?” she asks, ignoring Basseliniden’s emphasis and going to the heart of his statement. She never receives an answer to this query because the biggest burly man has told his cohort to shut the tall guy up.

The four next biggest men begin to move with much the same massive deliberation as a team of locomotives, or perhaps an accelerating avalanche, with each step gaining an irresistible momentum. There begins a tumult . . . Bronwyn is never afterward certain what else to more accurately call it . . . that seems to have little other purpose than demolishing the café . . . an altogether worthwhile activity and one which she would have normally wholeheartedly supported have she thought it the sole ultimate goal of the affair and had been less intimately involved However, it is more than clear that the café’s furnishings are only getting in the way of the big men’s intention to destroy them. For all the sympathy she feels for the beating that Basseliniden is taking, even though his superior agility is enabling him to delay what she is certain is an inevitable mangling, she nevertheless feels strongly that the physical well-being of none of them would have been in jeopardy had the captain simply kept his mouth shut.

What is now occurring is obviously not what the big men have in mind when they first came in. All that they had wanted to do is take the three foreigners to some magistrate or other. A not altogether unreasonable request since they are, after all, strangers in the town; and in a town itself not particularly toothsome they are, in their present post-castaway condition, not the most attractive feature. If their summons had been a little curt, perhaps that is merely the local way of doing things, a hearty if blunt honesty. She had not particularly liked it, and here she conveniently suppresses her original participatlon in the thug-baiting, but it would have done no harrn to have seen what is wanted of them. It certainly would have drawn far less attention than the present violent dismantling of the café.

Two things occurr more or less simultaneously that give the princess more personally immediate things to think about; the first, by a few seconds: she and the professor are each seized by one of the big men. With her arms pinned behind her back as immovably as though they were encased in iron bands there is little she can do but kick ineffectively. The professor gives no more resistance than an armload of kindling. The second, nearly simultaneous occurrence: Basseliniden kicks over a charcoal brazier that had been heating a large copper pot of fish oil. The sparkling coals ignite the splashing oil almost immediately and a sheet of dark red flame and dense smoke erupts from the floor.

The proprietor, who had watched the meleé while leaning casually into one corner of the room, arms folded, remains unperturbed by what promises to develop into a definitive catastrophe, at least so far as his place of business is concerned.

As Bronwyn is dragged into the street, one of the last things she hears from inside is the big brute shouting, “Where’d th’ tall guy go?”

She sees that the professor had been carried outside as well; he is much taller than his captor, who is having a great deal of difficulty in handling the lanky body.

“Are you all right?” Bronwyn calls.

“I’m just fine, thank you,” the professor replies calmly.

“I thinks they’d hurt you.”

“Just practicing passive resistance.”

“Where’s the . . . my uncle?”

“Shut up!” orders the boss thug, emerging from the smoking building, then to his men: “Git those two to th’ magistrate’s office, then git back here with some more men, one of ‘em’s got away.”

At first the princess is elated that Basseliniden has escaped capture, but this is immediately followed, and negated, by another thought:
I knew it! I knew it! He
is
a coward! He ran out on me just when I needed him the most!

While Bronwyn continues to grow ever more sullen and angry she and the professor are carried bodily through the now even more dismal-appearing streets of Hartal-around-the-Bend. What is evidently the magistrate’s office is, fortunately, not far from the ruined café . . . though no place is very far removed from another in the small town. The office is distinguished by being one of the few stone buildings the princess has seen in Hartal. One of the last things Bronwyn glimpses as she is carried in through the door is a thick column of black smoke coiling above the rooftops
. I hope the whole miserable town burns to the ground,
she thinks earnestly.

Once inside, the grasp of Bronwyn’s captors is replaced by no less effective iron shackles, fastening both ankles and wrists. For a moment she and the professor are left alone and she takes the opportunity to ask him, “Do you think they know who we really are?”

Wittenoom looks at her through askew spectacles, only getting about three-quarters of one eye’s worth. “I don’t think so,” he replies.

“They can’t treat all strangers this way.”

“They weren’t going to until Captain Basseliniden excited them.”

“I hope he’s not dead so I can kill him myself,” she growls. “He ran out on us! How can he have done that?”

“Perhaps he have his reasons?”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure he did.”

A new face appears at the doorway (a new face in the sense that Bronwyn has never seen it before, in any other sense it looked quite well-used). “Come this way!” it orders. Bronwyn and the professor follow as best as they can, hobbled as they are. On the other side of the door is a larger room furnished mainly with an enormous wooden desk. There are other furnishings, but they are trivialized by the mammoth piece of furniture, behind which sits the person whom Bronwyn rightly assums is the magistrate. He is a gentleman almost frighteningly elderly; the princess is certain that he would burst into dust at the slightest touch, like a puffball or Prince Rupert’s drop. Eyes, nose and mouth are merely minor variations among the thousands of wrinkles upon wrinkles that make his face look like a toy balloon from which most of the air has gradually leaked. When he speaks, in a voice like crumpling cellophane, Bronwyn is certain she sees flecks of dried-up skin float away from his face like leaves blowing from a tree in autumn.

“Vagrants, I see,” crackles the magistrate. “Ten crowns or ten days. Next case.”

“Just a moment, uh, your honor,” interrupts the princess as one of the magistrate’s muscular bailiffs puts his hand on her shoulder, preparatory to leading her away. “We’re not vagrants. We were shipwrecked. One of your townspeople, a fisherman, a . . . ah . . . Captain Prittly . . . rescued us and brought us back to the village. We were just trying to get something to eat when these men assaulted us!”