A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (18 page)

There are only five thousand men, two brigades, far less than she might have liked, and all the most brutal-looking thugs she has ever seen, but still more than enough according to the duke. He argued that while there may be upwards of ten or fifteen thousand Guards (a number he, too, has heard but seriously doubts) scattered throughout Tamlaght, he questioned whether Payne Roelt would be able to put half that number in the field at one time. Too, the Guards are an elite corps that comprise more a kind of secret police than a military organization, assembled from just the variety of hoodlum, criminal, petty tyrant, sycophant, sadist and toady who would be attracted to Lord Roelt and his cronies. There is little or no training, only the inculcation of a blind obedience to General Praxx and Payne Roelt. Mathias did not think that they would present any truly formidable military obstacle. Still, the column of men on the highway below her do not look as substantial as she would have liked. It bothers her, too that so much of the army’s artillery and supplies had been lost in the storm. It is not a prolonged battle she has been looking forward to all of this time, but rather a surgical Roeltectomy.

Considerably more than five hundred miles separate the army from Blavek, at the very best a month’s march in this weather perhaps longer. What would Payne Roelt do in that time?

She spurred her big white horse and trotted down the hill where she pulls up alongside one of the big supply wagons. A sad-faced soldier is driving while Professor Wittenoom placidly rides on the same seat beside him.

“Good afternoon, Princess!” he calls to her as the soldier touches the brim of his cap deferentially.

“How are you, Professor? I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you since we arrived.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it. I’ve been so busy I’ve scarcely noticed.”

“Did any of your shipment arrive safely?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. The
Barracuda
broke up on rocks just off shore, not far from here, and the only portion of her cargo that can be saved is salvaged from what washed ashore.”

“Oh, dear,” says Bronwyn, who had been counting a great deal upon Londeacan science to make up for any difference in manpower that might exist between her small army and her enemy’s forces. “What did you manage to save?”

“Perhaps two dozen cases of aerial torpedoes, but I haven’t have an opportunity to check them for damage.”

“Aerial torpedoes?” the princess asks, but the professor interrupts her question.

“How far are we from Blavek?”

“About five hundred and fifty miles.”

“That far? It seems unlikely to me that we’ll be allowed to get that far unimpeded.”

“Well, both the duke and I are surprised that we’ve been left undisturbed this long. Perhaps Payne doesn’t want to fight.”

“It’s possible. Most thieves prefer to escape unscathed with their loot. Lord Roelt, it seems from what you’ve told me, has neither ideological, political, patriotic nor any other ties with Tamlaght. That is, he has only himself to defend; a burglar robbing a church is hardly likely to stop and wage battle with the police who discovered him just because of his religious convictions.”

“It’s true; Payne is much more likely to take what he can and run.”

“Are there many villages or towns between here and the capital? This heat is terrible.”

“Only a few; nothing of any great size, though. Provisioning five thousand men is going to be difficult.”

But not as difficult as the princess thinks. Long before the army begains to move toward the capital, in fact, almost simultaneous with the establishment of the camp, word has spread to every farm and village that lay between it and Blavek. As the men plough through the sticky heat, like deep sea divers laboriously dragging their leaden feet through submarine ooze and their bodies through the resisting liquid denseness, their road is lined with people offering water, beer, wine and milk. Preserved and pickled vegetables and fruit, what little survived the storm and drought, and dried meat and fish are handed over in baskets and tied in kerchiefs or newspapers. At every rest stop and doubly so at every encampment there appear the quiet, tired-looking people who feed and water the troops. And every time this happens Bronwyn finds herself wondering, in mystification and horror:
What has Payne Roelt done to the people of Tamlaght? They look like beaten animals. And yet look at this! They have almost nothing yet give us what little they have, just because they believe that we’re going to relieve them of the burden of Lord Roelt and my brother. Can it be worth that much to them? Can it have been
that
bad?

At the village of Whuttley, the first large town outside of Blavek, which now lies less than fifty miles distant, Bronwyn and her commanders receive both news and a happy surprise. Waiting for them at the city gates are more than three hundred men: four companies of soldiers consolidated from what remains of the personal armies of the dissolved and beaten Barony. They had drifted in from all over Tamlaght, moving as soon as the news of the arrival of Bronwyn’s forces had reached them. They are under the nominal command of Colonel T. O. Molnar, an arrangement Bronwyn and the duke see no reason to change, since he is a seasoned and experienced soldier and his men liked and trusted him (as they might not a foreigner like Mathias). However pleasing this addition is to the princess’ own officers, this is not the greatest of Bronwyn’s surprises. That is reserved for the appearance of the tall, powerfully built man who steps ahead of the main body.

“Gyven!” she cries, almost falling from her horse as she scrambles to dismount. He helps her to the ground, thereby preserving her dignity and making her anxiousness look considerably more graceful. She keeps her hands on his forearms and looks up into his face (
Holy Musrum! He must be a foot taller than I am!)
while a wave of emotion sweeps through her, creating a kind of verbal logjam that permits her to only stutter and stammer as tears well in her eyes. She finally abandons all hope of uttering any coherent phrases and settles for merely repeating “Gyven! Gyven!” as she buries her face in his chest in which broad expanse there is more than enough room.

He presses her to him, and she feels his face and the warmth of his breath in her hair as he whispers, “I despaired of ever seeing you again! All the news is that you have been lost in the storm. How did you get here?”

“Me? How did
you
get here? The last time I saw you is in the Dark Forest.”

“I’ll tell you all about that later. Where are Thud and the baron? Aren’t they with you?”

Bronwyn feels much of the joy drain from her face. “No. I don’t know where they are. The last that I saw of either one is back in Lesser Piotr. They both just disappeared.”

“They would never have abandoned you willingly.”

“I know. Roelt or Praxx must have had something to do with it. It’s the only thing I can imagine. I miss them both terribly.”

“Well, you can tell me all about your adventures shortly. First we’d best take care of your people here.”

That is more or less easily done. Whuttley has had have several weeks to prepare itself for the arrival of the princess’ army. An abandoned Guards barracks is turned over to the duke and his officers, and dozens of private homes take in as many of the individual soldiers as they can. The remainder are presented the large square near the center of town, on the border of the River Whuttley, that is normally reserved for the farmer’s market and the annual agricultural fair. Given grateful leave by their officers, the dessicated soldiers rehydrate themselves in the tepid, silty waters of the nearly stagnant river.

Bronwyn is the special guest of the mayor, the Honorable Dipner R. Dornoch, and that evening she, Duke Mathias and Gyven sit at the mayor’s table for dinner. Dornoch’s wife and children are out of town at that very moment, visiting a sick relative, and would be devastated, she is told, to learn that they have missed the princess’ arrival. The mayor is a fat, reddish, fluttering man with a reedy, high-pitched voice whom she finds easy to ignore. In fact, she would have been embarrassed had she realized that she would have been capable of ignoring almost anything while Gyven is in the same room with her. While one part of her automatically deals with the mayor’s fatuous conversation, she is able to concentrate the remaining ninety or ninety-five percent of her attention on Gyven. That this left very little for the duke is something of which only Mathias is all too aware.

She is anxious to learn how the man had found himself here, apparently waiting for her, when the last she had been aware of him he had been in the company of a nation of faeries more than a thousand miles away, in a straight line. He is equally curious about her adventures, but she takes advantage of her rank and insists that he tell her his story first.

It is, a little to her disappointment, simple enough. Gyven’s mandate from the Kobold king was to transport the entire Kingdom of Faeries from Londeac, where they were being threatened by the ever-increasing spread of industry and science, to Tamlaght, the last bastion of superstition, ignorance, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism: an ideal climate for the faeries’ continued existence. He had solved the problem of moving a population that, even in its reduced circumstances, amounted to hundreds of thousands of individuals, by taking advantage of their indeterminate size and ethereal composition. Obtaining a dozen large packing crates, he placed the entire faerie kingdom into them, after introducing holes for ventilation (just to err on the side of safety). Carting these to the nearest coastal village, he contracted for their shipment to Glibner. While the faeries hibernated (he assumed) in the hold, Gyven enjoyed the brief sea voyage. Once arrived in Tamlaght, Gyven transported the crates of faeries to the mountains north of the town (the matter of customs having been easily taken care of with substantial distribution of faery gold, whose fugitive and impermanent qualities must have come as an unpleasant surprise to the greedy officials). Once in the mountains Gyven’s wagons were met by an indefinably strange group of people who relieved him of his responsibility (after assuring him that they did indeed represent Hod Tawley, the local king of the faeries, an assurance he felt disinclined to doubt) and the last he saw of his tiny charges was an evanescent twinkling from the airholes in the crates before they vanished into the deep forest.

Left to his own devices, Gyven was for some time at a loss for something to do. He worked at a number of jobs, when he could; mostly simple manual labor since the acutely depressed economy did not encourage employment, and by the time Gyven had arrived in the country only the most arduous and distasteful of jobs remained available. Nevertheless he performed them as best he could
,
took his few poenigs or, in most cases, his allotment of miserable food, and moved on to the next. Always in the back of his mind was finding some way to rejoin the aggravating but attractive princess; yet without money or means he saw no way to even begin his search for her. He carefully husbanded the few poenigs he could make, saving one here and another there. So it went for months until he encountered a group of armed men on the road. By this time he had only managed to save seventy-two poenigs, not even a full crown, and felt no closer to the princess than he had at the beginning. Feeling safe at least from robbery himself, he considered that robbery of others might not be such a bad idea. At first unconvinced that the strangers are not another one of the many similar-appearing bands of outlaws which he had previously avoided encountering, he joined them in their progress. Discovering that they were ex-baronial soldiers and sworn to the destruction of Payne Roelt, Gyven’s association with them gave him a vicarious sibship with the missing princess.

He is a little disappointed that the group is not a gang of thieves, though their methods of attaining food and provisions seemed little different from robbery. Their semimilitary status, however, allowed them to justify what they called “commandeering.” Unfortunately, it very seldom involved the acquisition of money.

By a gradual process of aggregation the little band grew, and as it grew it attracted ever more refugees from Payne’s pogrom. Eventually, news of the shipwrecked fleet arrived and when the little army, now grown to more than four hundred men, learned that it was the invasion they had long awaited, but had despaired of ever seeing, it set out to join it. By the time they had arrived at Whuttley they knew that there was indeed a foreign army on Tamlaghtan soil and that it had begun to move rapidly and inexorably toward the capital. Rather than continue on east to meet it, which would have entailed an unnecessary backtrack, they elected to remain in Whuttley, preparing quarters and provisions for the invaders’ arrival.

“When I learned that you were with them,” says Gyven, “I can hardly tell you how excited I was. It was all that I could do to prevent myself from riding out to meet you halfway. It’s good to see you again.”

“Oh, it’s good to see you, too, Gyven.” More, she is surprised to realize, than she would ever have suspected. More than is justified at meeting one of her three old companions. Especially the one who had always angered and frustrated her the most.

Mathias says nothing, but scowls as he is left alone to deal with the mayor’s inane prattling.

After dinner, and the princess would have been hard put to recall what she had eaten, if indeed she had eaten at all, Gyven and Mathias, excusing themselves on the pretext that duty to their comrades required them, went to their own quarters and Bronwyn retired to her bedroom, avoiding the mayor’s fawning and obsequious attentions by pleading a sick headache. From her window, she can see the two tall figures in the moonlight, as they stride as purposefully down the avenue as a pair of machines. She had once thought she loved one of them, and she has a growing certainty that she loves the other. If only, she wonders sadly, she had some idea of what that really meant.

She opens the opposite window, strips off her uniform and collapses on the comfortable bed, the first real bed she has occupied in months. A light breeze, on its way from one window to the other, drifts across her naked body like a gossamer sheet of silk; she is aware of every particular hair, even to the finest down, that covers her body as it is disturbed by the warm, atmospheric breath. She lies with her head propped against a thick, downy pillow, her arms at her sides, her legs straight and parallel. She is distantly surprised that a family composed of such short, squat people as the Dornochs have a bed long enough for her . . . though even at that her heels overhang the foot of the mattress and the crown of her head bumps the headboard.