A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (13 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess Online
Authors: Ron Miller
“I’m afraid the news is indeed bad, Father,” the princess replies. She goes on to tell him what she knows of the events recently taking place in Blavek and elsewhere in Tamlaght, how Payne Roelt is systematically looting the Church and stripping it of its influence and power. The abbot turns deathly pale as he learns of the hundreds of priests who have been put to death, and he is especially horrified at learning of the terrible fate of Bishop Harspranget.
“I can only suppose,” Bronwyn concludes, with more accuracy than tact, “that you’ve been ignored up until now because you have so little.”
“But this is distressing! What shall I do?”
Though the abbot is obviously directing his question to himself, Bronwyn takes it upon herself to offer an answer: “I think that the best thing would be to do nothing. There’s nought to be gained from drawing attention to yourself.”
“I suppose you’re right . . . still, it’s very difficult to sit here and do nothing. After all, ‘A bad arrangement is better than a process’.”
“What
can
you do?”
“Nothing useful, of course, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”
Bronwyn grows thoughtful. There is, of course, little the abbot can do to alleviate the situation in Blavek . . . or anywhere in Tamlaght, for that matter. The power of the Church has been effectively quashed by Payne Roelt and there is scant hope that it would ever regain its former position . . . certainly not in the princess’s lifetime. However, if the abbot is powerless to help his church and fellow clergy, it is not impossible that he can aid his princess to a small but not insignificant degree.
“Father, there is something I must entrust to you . . .” And she tells him her full name and a carefully abbreviated synopsis of her adventures and present goal. The good man is understandably incredulous until Bronwyn displays her signet ring, which is unmistakable. Too, once his attention has been drawn to her appearance, he cannot deny that her distinctive features are not only generally characteristic of the least inbred of the Tedeschiiys, but strongly recall the few representations of the princess he has previously seen in newspapers and magazines.
“But,” he protests, “if everything you say is true, then what can I possibly do?”
“By yourself, nothing, I suppose. In fact, I suspect that the best thing you can do for the Church would be to remain as inconspicuous as possible. However, you now know how important it is that I discover what happened to my army. Anything that you can do to help us get to the coast north of the Strait, anywhere between the Strait and Stuckney Bay, would be enormously helpful. I know virtually nothing of this territory.”
“There are only a few very small villages, scarcely deserving of the name!, between here and the coast. One of them is my own hometown, I admit, so perhaps I oughtn’t speak of them too harshly. Slintner-up-the-Orn. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it? I thinks not. In any case, I can offer you directions for the easiest route as well as a letter of introduction that ought to encourage the aid of anyone you may meet . . . even the villagers, who cannot read, ought to at least recognize the Great Seal.”
“That’d be a huge help, thank you. Do you have any idea of how far we may be from the coast? I’ve gotten completely disoriented.”
“Not terribly far, I suppose; perhaps two hundred and fifty miles or so.”
Not far!
The princess feels not a little sense of desperation, hoping that the abbot did not notice an involuntarily blasphemous but honestly expressed curse.
“Is there something wrong?” asks the abbot.
“No, no, there’s not,” she lies.
“You’re of course welcome to stay with us tonight,” continues the corpulent cleric, “and we’ll provide you with as many provisions as we can, food and whatnot, perhaps even some fresh clothing, if you wish. ‘To craunch the marmoset,’ as we say. Ha ha!”
“You’re very kind.”
That evening Bronwyn and the professor are given separate cells whose only furnishings are a plaster effigy of St. Woncible attached to the bare stone wall and a straw pallet. The princess strips off her clothing with more than a little disgust, looking forward to whatever replacements Father Flatnoy has promised to provide. She had been wearing the same sailor’s outfit for weeks, the same underthings ever since leaving Londeac, and, other than the occasions she had been able to rinse herself in a stream, and when she had fallen into the sea, has not have an opportunity to properly bathe or wash her clothes in all that time. She is surprised that skin does not come off with them.
A muggily sluggish breeze flows lethargically through the window like a heavy syrup. Both moons are scant crescents still not far above the horizon, following the sun which had set an hour before, and are still only fleeting glimmers visible through the trees that surround the abbey. They do not provide enough light to illuminate the chamber. The princess had tanned in the many months since she had first left home, and her body, she discovers, no longer has its old faint luminescence. There are so many more things she has lost in that time as well.
Her contact with the abbot is the first she had had with any officer of the Church in a great many years. She had long ago stopped attending services as soon as she realized that no one was bothering to monitor her attendance. It was at the time, she felt, one of the few beneficial side effects of her enforced invisibility.
Bronwyn had begun to doubt both the precepts and the motivations of the Church by the time she was twelve years old. At sixteen or seventeen, her doubts had become firm convictions. So much so, in fact, that she feels not a little guilt and confusion at accepting the good abbot’s honest generosity. She decides that even if he does hold the title of abbot, he is probably no better educated and no more willing to think for himself than any of the local peasants. He is just as perfectly happy to accept the bland and self-serving fairy tales concocted by the Church as the most illiterate peat-cutter or mushroom-gatherer.
She stretches out on the bed, watching the grinning moons drift through the trees.
I can easily believe in Musrum,
she decides,
if for no other reason than that my life can scarcely have been this consistently rotten without some sort of outside influence. It’s just the
Church
that I can’t believe in. I may not even believe in
Religion
, generally, regardless of it’s particular gods. In fact, I think I’ve about decided that Religion is a wholly human invention that we came up with because we cann’t figure out anything else to set us apart from the animals. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing that humans do that animals don’t do, too, although it’s usually to a lesser or greater degree. I mean, animals can communicate, just as we can, even if what they are communicating is simple, it’s communication for all of that. We usually ascribe all sorts of complex motives and meanings and whatnot to our actions, but that’s just window dressing. So, anyway, we have to invent something that can’t be seen or measured that animals don’t have: the soul. All so that adenoidal cowherd I saw this morning can feel superior to everything else on the planet.
Then the priests convince us that we’re all sinners bound directly for the furnaces of the Weedking, with our invisible, impalpable souls at risk, of course, and then tell us that only
they
can sell us the cure! It’s something like a quack doctor first convincing someone that they have a disease they didn’t know existed and then selling them a cure they didn’t know they needed. The priests’ advantage over the quack is that their cure does us no good until after we are dead, when, surprise, surprise, there’s not much chance of anyone ever complaining that it didn’t work. There’s no way you can absolve yourself of our built-in sins, either (the priests have covered every possible out: you don’t just become a sinner . . . that would limit the field of prospective clients . . . no, everyone on the planet is automatically
born
a sinner), only a priest can do that . . . and always for a price of course. It’s a great racket: there’s literally a sucker born every minute.
While she feels sorry for the priests hurt or killed in Payne’s pogrom, the looting of the Church is the one activity for which she holds the least against him.
She feels terribly wicked thinking these thoughts while practically in a church, and it gives her a very pleasant sensation.
She lay atop the blanket that covers her bed, luxuriating in its relative comfort, and without further mental ado, falls into a deep sleep.
Which seems to be almost immediately interrupted by the clangor of iron bells, even though the first murky, submarine glow of dawn is leaking into Bronwyn’s cell. She rouses with an instantaneous headache, a circumstance she loathes whenever it happens because it is a terribly depressing way to start a day. Behind the bells she can now hear shouts and cries.
What in the world is going on?
she wonders with considerable aggravation. Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, she leans from the window, looking into the court below. She is amazed and puzzled to see it filled with the abbey’s monks rushing to and fro in obvious confusion, and even in evident panic.
Not so groggy nor curious as not to feel revulsion at having to climb back into her old, unwashed clothes, she dresses hastily and rushes from her room. She meets the professor as he simultaneously came through his door.
“What’s happening?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he replies.
“Well, that should be easy enough to fix,” she says, and, being as good as her word, snatches at the sleeve of a monk who is at that moment dashing along the corridor past them. He turns a pale, shocked face toward her.
“What is happening, Father?” she asks.
“Happening?” he repeats dully. “The worst has happened!”
“What?” insists the princess, suddenly certain that Payne’s forces have discovered her whereabouts.
“Father Flatnoy,” says the monk, swallowing before he can continue. “Father Flatnoy is dead!”
“What?” Bronwyn gasps stupidly, but the monk has already hurried on.
She receives almost no other information, in spite of her best efforts, until almost noon. Meanwhile, the day has developed into one of unprecedented moistness. The slightest effort drenches the princess with an unevaporating perspiration that made her feel sticky and salty and her heavy clothing clings to her like a clammy, heavy papier-mâché. She itches. Her temper, touchy at the best of times, reaches a degree of irritability that has her snapping sarcastically at the silent and inoffensive professor. His refusal to be baited into fighting with her irritates her even more.
She is finally approached by a small, elderly monk who introduces himself as Father Spleenbottle, who had until this unfortunate day occupied the role of second-in-command to the late abbot. He apologizes in a distracted and ill-expressed fashion for having ignored his guests in the hopefully understandable confusion of the morning.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” the little man whines. “We’re wholly unprepared for this.”
“I don’t see what the problem is,” replies the princess, with an undisguised lack of sympathy. “You’ll have a funeral, you’ll bury the abbot or put him in a crypt or whatever you do, and you’ll take over. That should all be simple enough.”
“I only wish it were. For some reason, the abbot took it into his head that he wanted his remains buried in his home town, Slintner-up-the-Orn. It’s tragically ironic that it is only just last night that the abbot is reminiscing about his childhood there and expressed this, his last, I’m devastated to say, wish. I have no idea why he suddenly feels so nostalgic; it is quite un-like him. Perhaps he have a premonition, a presentiment.”
The princess thinks it best not to mention her conversation with the late abbot . . . and is having something of a presentiment herself: that she might be about to regret that very same discussion. “I still don’t understand what this is all about. What
is
the problem, exactly?”
“None of us here can leave the abbey; we are sworn to Musrum to pass our lives here, within its walls, in His service. It would be quite impossible for us to leave. Quite impossible.”
“The abbot’ll be leaving,” she points out, a little crudely.
“Only in death,” whimpers the acting abbot.
“I assume that your problem has something to do with us?”
“Yes, indeed. You evidently told the abbot something that he considered of great importance . . . at least I know that he is uncommonly serious last night, since he chose not to confide in me at that time. And he
always
confided in me. There is no one he trusted more. Whoever you are, he seemed to regard you with considerable respect. I must admit,” he adds in a conspiratorial whisper, “that I have my own suspicions, but rest assured that none will know what they are,
your Highness.”
“Thanks very much,” Bronwyn replies with wasted sarcasm.
“I know from what Father Flatnoy told me last night that it is of the gravest urgency to the Church that you reach Slintner-up-the-Orn with the speediest dispatch. We must keep the abbot’s promise, of course, and can offer you a cart and mule, as well as provisions and even a little money.”
Taken a little by surprise, Bronwyn can only stutter her thanks, which she would have choked back if she could at the next words uttered by the shriveled little monk: “And all you will have to do is transport Father Flatnoy’s body to his final resting place, Musrum save his soul.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS
Slintner-up-the-Orn is, Bronwyn learns, only a dozen miles from the coast north of the entrance to the Strait. It might be possible, she decides, to discover news of her lost army in the town itself. However, the village is more than two hundred miles away, even taking advantage of the long summer days, still a journey of no less than a week, and probably at least ten days.
The vast corpse of Father Flatnoy has been packed in salt and sewn into a huge canvas bag, since no one at the abbey or in the surrounding village has the necessary skills or materials for constructing a coffin, especially one nearly the size of a small house. That final formality would have to wait until they arrived at Slintner. The domed bulk of the abbot’s remains fills the small wagon, leaving scant room for either the princess, the professor or their supplies.
The abbey’s mule, or, rather, a mule that has been commandeered from a reluctant and resentful villager, proves to be no difficulty, plodding along at a steady rate, as brainless as a machine.
The refugees are able to spend their nights far more comfortably than they had before arriving at the abbey. By simply displaying the paper bearing the Church’s seal, they are afforded hospitality wherever they choose to stop, though more often than not that hospitality is little enough and not always graciously surrendered.
It is not until the third day out that Bronwyn asks the professor, “What’s that smell?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed it, too. I suspect it’s our late friend.”
“
What
?”
“I doubt that salt is a very effective preservative in such hot weather, especially when so hastily applied.”
“Oh, you don’t mean . . .” She turns to look at their cargo with an expression of distress.
“The two and a half or three hundred pounds of flesh that once represented the good abbot,” the professor continues, “would really have required marinating in brine for some considerable time to become perfectly preserved. Simply packing salt around the cadaver is, at best, merely a short-term measure.”
“
How
short-term?”
“Oh, only a few days, I suspect. It’s not really my field.”
“You mean that the abbot isn’t pickled enough?”
“Well, strictly speaking, he isn’t pickled at all.”
“I’m not traveling another mile with him, then, if he’s going to start decomposing on us.”
“What can you do?”
“The first thing that crosses my mind is to leave him out in the woods somewhere.”
“We’re still too close to the abbey, aren’t we, for that?”
“So?”
“If you just leave the body out there, someone’s bound to find it and report to the abbey.”
“So?”
“Well, at the moment, the Church is your only ally, such as it is, in all of Tamlaght. At least so far as we know. It might not do to antagonize it at this early stage.”
“I don’t know what it can do, but all I’ll say is: we’ll see.”
The heat continues, and Bronwyn, who can not reasonably hope for a respite from the high temperature, prays for at least a light headwind. The smell leaking from the seams of the canvas bag travel with them, as though they are imbedded in a kind of gaseous aspic. Dogs have taken to following them and biting at the wheels of the cart. Their hosts, when they seek shelter for the night, awed by the Church seal, do not question the contents of the tautly swelling mound in the back of the cart, but neither do they feel any compunction about requesting that it be parked as far from the house as possible. Only the mule seemed unaffected.
On the morning of the sixth day, Bronwyn declares that she has reached the limit of her endurance and patience. “We’ll bury him this morning,” she announces. “As soon as we’re away from anyone, we’ll haul him into the woods and bury him. We can’t be all that far from Slintner now. We can think of some sort of plausible explanation for leaving the body and if the people there want to come back and dig him up, they’re more than welcome to.”
Five or six miles from their last resting-stop finds them in a scrubby pine woods. There is a heavy, pungent scent of sulfur in the air, a welcome relief, masking the by now nauseating aroma from the back of the cart. They pull the cart as far off the track as they can and then dismount.
“He looks a lot bigger than I recall,” says the princess.
“That’s to be expected,” replies the scientist. “The gasses produced during decomposition are swelling the corpse, something like a balloon being inflated. Although in this case, of course, the gasses are the likes of methane, for example, rather than hydrogen.”
“Oh, Musrum,” moans Bronwyn. “Let’s get this over with.”
The great canvas sack has distended to nearly twice its original volume and is now nearly spherical and as bloated as a well-fed tick.
“Let’s see if we can dig the grave, first,” says the princess, a little daunted by the scale of the task she has set, and not a little put off by her own squeamishness. The bag looks soft and gelatinous, like some enormous spider’s egg case. There is a sheen to it that canvas ought not to have.
She and the professor walk a hundred yards or so into the woods. The ground beneath her feet feels and looks odd. It gives off a slight ringing sound when trod upon and the dry, reddish-grey soil of the countryside has been replaced by a white, flaky gypsum-like material. The sulfurous smell grows stronger. She is about to ask the professor what the source of this new odor might be when they stepp into a vast clearing and her question is quelled aborning.
The open area before her extends for several square miles, the best that Bronwyn can judge, as far as the horizon in three directions, and is so starkly bone-white that she is momentarily dazzled by its glare. Shading her eyes, she sees a landscape lifted directly from the kingdom of the Weedking and in fact she has seen nothing like it since leaving the Kobolds: there are complex, snowy terraces with each curvilinear platform filled with a pool of intensely blue water, like the terraced rice paddies she had seen in books about the mountain cultures of Peigambar. Steaming water trickles from terrace to terrace in shimmering skins that make the white stone look like glazed porcelain. In the middle distance, and slightly downhill from where she stands, are circular sheets of water ranging from a yard or so to hundreds of feet in diameter. The water shades from a pale cerulean at the rims through an electric phthalocyanine to a deep eggplant purple in the center that borders upon black. Surrounding the pools are swirling patterns of primary yellows, reds, and oranges, like a box of wax crayons melted on a tabletop. The colors glow like molten iron through the translucent haze of vapor that floats from every shimmering surface. Nearer her are smaller pools, some of them only a foot or so across, whose surfaces quiver and fizz like carbonated water. Others boil and surge. At her feet are tiny, navel-like pits that splutter like miniature teakettles. It is all as uncanny as it is beautiful.
“Look!” she cries in astonishment, pointing at one of the large pools a few hundred yards away. Its surface has just bulged in the middle, as though a huge, glassy, transparent head has thrust itself curiously above the water level. The surge subsides, then repeats itself, each cycle sending waves splashing over the crimson rim. On the fifth or sixth surge, the dome bursts like a huge bubble and a column of water explods high into the air, as though a silent bomb has just been detonated. The sparkling water is just descending when another burst throws up a mass of liquid even higher than the first. These continue in rapid succession, with no more sound than a soft thumping and the hissing splash of the falling water, until the water is being thrown to a height, Bronwyn estimates, of at least one hundred and fifty feet.
“Steam explosions,” she hears the professor mutter.
“What did you say?”
“Steam explosions. Those hot springs are fed by subterranean plumbing that may go down thousands of feet through convoluted fissures in the substrata. At that depth, where it is restrained by enormous pressures, the water can be heated to a point far above its normal boiling point. At the slightest provocation, just the least lessening of that pressure, the subterranean water instantly flashes into steam, driving all of the water above it upwards and, eventually, into the open air, as we have just seen.”
“It’s beautiful! These pools and springs remind me of the Kobold kingdom, but there is nothing there like that spouting spring.”
“I’ve heard of such phenomena, but they’re quite rare. I’ve never seen one myself.”
As though by prearranged signal or accord, a half-dozen or more of the beautiful fountains are playing, their feathery plumes drifting as gracefully as white boas. Some of the fountains erupt vertically in exquisitely formal symmetry; others fan out like the tails of enormous albino peacocks; while others made graceful arches like liquid rainbows.
“Well,” Bronwyn finally says, “now what about the abbot?”
“I’m afraid that it’d be quite impossible to bury him here.”
“Why not? I think he’d like it.”
“Be that as it may, but the ground here is almost solid travertine. I noticed that back at the road.”
“So?”
“It’s the deposit from millions of years of these springs. It’s a very hard, sinter-like mineral. We’d never be able to dig a grave into it. See how sickly these trees look? They can’t develop deep root systems in the shallow soil. It may not even be
safe
to dig around here.” He stamps a foot to prove his point: the ground beneath it rings hollowly.
“Can’t we roll him into one of these big springs?”
“He’d cook!”
Biting back the urge to say “So what?”, the princess disconsolately returns to the cart with the professor, where they find the mule and the abbot patiently awaiting them.
They travel one more day, having taken to wearing moistened kerchiefs tied around their mouths and noses, but that night even the awesome seal of the Church is insufficient to convince anyone to allow the cart and its contents to remain within sight, let alone smell, of a house, and Bronwyn and the professor have to once more take to sleeping in the woods, something which the princess does not like at all.
The next morning she determines once and for all to bury the abbot. She first obtains assurance from the scientist that the soil has returned to normal and then uses several coins from the meager allowance given them by the abbey to purchase an old shovel from the next farm they pass. As soon as they have traveled a few miles further, Bronwyn pulls to the side of the road, takes the shovel and heads into the woods, all with the greatest haste.
She finds a small clearing and, between her own efforts and that of the professor, who proves to be less than efficient at this sort of manual labor, she succeeds at last in creating a crater that she feels is of sufficient volume to accommodate the swollen bulk of the late abbot. The work has taken hours longer than she had hoped; the furnace-like heat is debilitating. The professor has not labored very long before he suddenly grows as pale as a sheet of bleached writing paper. Bronwyn insists that he lie in the shade beneath a tree, while she continues with the project. The professor promptly falls asleep. Returning to the excavation, she shucks her blouse, which peels from her like a paper label soaked from a tin can. Even this fails to cool her as the already supersaturated air refuses to accept the moisture that pours from her body in rivers. She is quickly covered with a fine coating of yellow, clayey dust from her work, which, mixed with her perspiration, creates muddy rivulets and silty deltas form beneath her armpits and breasts.
She awakens the sleeping Witlenoom, who has regained much of his original color, and together they return to the cart. The sound of flies greet them before they see the ever-increasing bulk swelling above the sides of the vehicle.
“How are we going to move him to the grave?” asks the professor reasonably.
“We’ll worry about that once we’ve gotten him off the cart,” Bronwyn replies, not realizing yet that this is to prove to be something far easier anticipated than done. The abbot’s bag has swollen like a balloon, the seams distended so that a hundred gaps allow an unbelievably noxious gas to be emitted in almost visible volumes. Dark clouds of flies have unimpeded egress and ingress. With every movement of the vehicle the bag bounces and sways like a huge gelatin mold, puffing out clouds of the nauseating stench, like a whale with halitosis.
It is impossible. The swelling has firmly jammed the bag against the sides of the cart.
The princess and the professor pull and tug at the heavy canvas, at the same time reluctant to overly disturb it; every movement causes it to exhale even more rotten gasses into their faces. It also makes sounds unbearable to listen to. In the end, the bag proves immovable.
“We’ve got to get it off there,” says the princess desperately and unnecessarily.
“We could take the wagon apart.”
“I thought of that, but to dismantle the sides we’d have to take the axle off. We can’t do that while the abbot is still on the cart.”
“We can cut the bag apart.”
Beneath her coating of clay the princess turns a very pale green. “No, no, I don’t think that I could do that.”
“If we open the bag, he might just . . . ah . . . sort of pour out.”
“Stop it, I said! I don’t want to hear any more about that.”
“Then I don’t see any other recourse but to continue on to whatever the name of that town is.”
“Slintner. Up the Orn.”
“Yes, Slintner. It can’t be much more than another day away. Surely we can stand this one day more?”
“If my army isn’t there I’m going to slit my wrists.”
Her army is not there when they arrive the next afternoon, but Bronwyn has, of course, by then forgotten her rash alternate promise of the day before. They take the abbot directly to the local church, whose squat bulk had been easily visible as they descended from the forests into the broad, undulating plain, which shimmered beneath the unrelenting sun like the surface of a hot stove.
Their arrival is greeted with lamentations when the nature of their burden is explained. There is a well beside the church and while the churchmen circle the cart, wringing their hands, Bronwyn and the professor pour buckets of tepid water over each other’s heads, sluicing away layer after layer of impacted dust, dirt, clay and sweat. When the princess finally produces the letter given her by the assistant abbot, Spleenbottle, there is clear disbelief on the face of the priest when the missive identifies the letter’s carrier. Bronwyn sees him glance at her briefly over the top of the page, assessing her unprepossessing appearance. She feels a wave of embarrassment she has not experienced in some time; she is suddenly very self-consciously aware of what she must look like: a tall, rangy-looking girl, her filthy copper mane as knotted and matted as a freshly coughed-up hairball, sunburned, dry lips crusty and scabbed, dressed in ill-fitting rags, her long bare calves stuck into the tops of a pair of huge, loaf-like boots. None of this is improved by her expression. Before the priest can ask to see it, she shows him her ring, which evidence he seems to accept, if a little reluctantly and not a little sceptically.