A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (19 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess Online
Authors: Ron Miller
Moonlight shines in through either window; a cool, bright light from the larger moon to her left and a slightly subdued pinkish light from her right. Bishadowed and bicolored, her body shimmers and iridesces like a mother-of-pearl carving, like a phosphorescent mushroom. She looks at it with some curiosity, as though she had never before given it much thought, which, in reality, is not entirely the truth. Her legs are meandering ridges, like volcanic dikes, one blue, the other pink, the long valley between a bottomless crevasse. Perspective makes her feet seem far away, at the ends of the foreshortened curves of her legs. A long journey, she thinks, from those toe-capped pillars, up the complex curves of shins and thighs, past the bushy mound that looks like a patch of purple lichen in the moonlight, or perhaps a distant copse or oasis beyond the flat, softly undulating meadow of her stomach, which she pauses briefly to watch rise and fall like a soft linen sheet hanging from a line to dry and billowing in a gentle breath of air, to her hemispherical breasts, which are pointing at opposite corners of the ceiling, and, she realizes for the first time, are slightly mismatched in size. She can see that they are covered with a fine sheen of perspiration, like a dewy spider web, like sand dunes sparkling in the moonlight. It is easy to imagine that she is looking across some alien, moonlit landscape with its soft hills and undulations, its valleys and plains, wells and forests, parks and piedmonts.
I wonder what Gyven thinks of my body?
her mind asks, a question she would never have considered had she been wholly conscious. It doesn’t even embarrass her now.
Does he think of it at all, I wonder. Why
would
he think of it? There’s certainly nothing particularly special about it. Or is he still above, or beyond, such things? “Innocent of them” might be more appropriate. Has he known any other women since I saw him last? What a terrible thing to think! Why am I asking this? Am I trying to be jealous? But no, I can’t imagine him with someone. He’s too . . . unearthly; he’s like Thud in a lot of ways. Perhaps he only likes me the way that Thud does . . . like a big dog. I don’t want to believe that, though. And it can’t be true. Not the way he acts around me, not the way he looks at me. It’d be nice if he thinks that I have an attractive body. I’d like that. I’d like it because I’d like Gyven to like anything at all about me and I can’t, in all honesty, imagine someone liking me for my personality.
Then what about Gyven’s body? her mind persists, taking advantage of someone who is too tired to govern her own thoughts.
Great Musrum, I know what
I
think of it! He’s all gender. But there has to be more than that, doesn’t there? I thought I loved Mathias, and he certainly is attractive enough physically. But I didn’t realize that until after I’d grown to know him. Well, I mean,
she argued with herself,
I know he is handsome and all that, but that just seem to be a fact about him, like his name, or his hair color. Gyven, on the other hand, I couldn’t stand from the day I first met him. In fact, on the day that I met him he actually repulsed me, and I gradually grew to like him even less. Yet even then the very sight of him made me go all loose and liquidy inside. He made me feel as though I was some animal in heat, totally out of control of my emotions and desires. I really resented that. I still do. The emotions that I feel with and about Mathias seemed so, so, rational; the emotions that I feel about Gyven . . . I have no control over.
I’ve got to think about something else or I’m never going to get to sleep. Why don’t ducks sink? I’ve often wondered about that
. . . She wonders if the humidity would continue through the night. Fine beads of perspiration trickle down the sides of her face, between her breasts, navigated her ribs, tickled her thighs, following glistening trails lightly like tiny insects. It is as though the primeval landscape of her body is evolving its own system of rivers, streams and lakes. The muggy air does nothing to cool her; it is like a heavy, soggy blanket.
Musrum! I hate sweating in bed.
She rolls to her side, but the sheet beneath her sticks to her back, and she can’t abide the hot, itchy feel of her arms against her body or the heat and sticky weight of her legs pressed together. She rolls back over, mopping her face with a corner of the sheet. Gyven’s rock-bound face, looking as always like a mineral concretion, continues to drift in and out of her vision, as her unattended brain dieseled, its governor wired down so that it ran out of control, ever faster, ever wilder. With a sigh she climbs from the bed and lumbers unsteadily to the ishstand, where she splashes water that is only comparatively cooler onto her face. She lets it run in tepid rivulets down the length of her torso, from which it drips onto the floor, circling her feet in a clinquant faery ring. The salt and stickiness washes from her face but leaves her eyes feeling puffy and itchy with sleep. She glances through the window by her elbow; it overlooks the street and most of the nearby rooftops since she is in an attic room and the mayor’s house is one of the largest in the small town. There are no lights visible, it must be three or four o’clock in the morning. The smaller moon has set, but the larger one is nearly full and is still fairly high in the clear, pewter-colored sky. A light mist has formed in the humid air. It fills the streets with a dim, glaucescent softness and in its midst the slate-roofed buildings make a dark archipelago. She leans on the sill, her thoughts as torpid and heavy as the atmosphere.
Turning away, she pulls the rocking chair that sat near the bed over to the window, tosses some cushions onto it to cover its cane seat and back, and slouches into it, her long legs stretched out to rest on a low chest beneath the window. She can just see the peaks of the nearest roofs, decorated with ornamental wrought iron lightning conductors, with the remaining moon centered in the frame. Holding her head as still as she can, she tries to see if the moon’s slow movement might actually be visible, especially if she watches it in relation to some stationary object. After a few minutes she is certain that it is discernibly closer to the nearest lightning conductor (shaped crudely to represent St. Spodnill riding his traditional codfish). And as it draws closer to the ornament, she is convinced that she can see the moon’s movement, the gap between the bright disk and the black saint and fish is perceptibly narrowing. It is a strange sensation, she thinks, as though she were eavesdropping on some great secret, or perhaps the feeling is that she has slipped into some differently paced perception of time itself. The enormous, blue-white circle slides behind the iron saint and his fish and a brief moment silhouettes the long-forgotten cleric with a gleaming halo that only the contemplative, secret princess sees.
She never notices when she finally falls asleep.
Bronwyn breakfasts with the mayor and his family the following morning. It is still dark outside: dawn is still only a vaguely rosy blush on the steel-grey horizon. Unlike the previous evening, when she had not been present, the mayor’s wife joins the meal. She is a small, round woman who does not, so far as Bronwyn can tell, move the focus of her gaze from a point precisely fixed in the center of her plate, blushing furiously the whole time. Not only is Mrs. Dornoch there but all of the lesser Dornochs as well, male and female, who range in age from five to twenty, looked exactly like their father and mother, who in turn are indistinguishable, and were arranged by size like the pipes of a calliope. They are all hopelessly in awe of the presence of the Princess Bronwyn and only pretend to eat; to do otherwise would have meant taking their eyes off Bronwyn for an unallowable second. Food is consequently dribbled, unnoticed, everywhere but the vicinity of mouths. This combined with the effect of sixteen unblinking, unwavering eyes is unnerving.
The mayor maintains a monologue, continued, as far as Bronwyn can tell, unbroken from the previous evening. Fortunately, this limited the princess’ conversational responsibility to more or less inarticulate grunts.
Pleading her duty, she escapes as quickly as possible and rejoins her army, which is already regrouped in the enormous market ground. Glancing back only once, she sees the entire Dornoch clan motionlessly watching her from the open doorway. She finds Mathias and his colonels already discussing what the immediate future may hold.
Only fifty miles separate the town from Blavek: only three or four more days. They cannot reasonably expect that their way will remain unimpeded for very much longer. While no one expects that the Guards will be able to provide any serious resistance, they can, by sheer numbers, wear away the princess’ forces. What would be worse, the Guards might provide enough of a delay that the king and his cohorts could make an easy escape. The goal is, after all, not to take Blavek but to capture Payne Roelt. Storming the city is an undesirable but necessary nuisance.
Ideally, the city would be approached from the south, where the palace is relatively exposed. That means that somewhere the army would have to cross the Moltus River, which south of the city is broad and deep. It is unfordable, nor are there any bridges south of the capital. The alternative is to attack the city from the north. In this case, however, the palace would be separated from the army by the Moltus River, which is spanned by only two bridges, and the bulk of the city itself, whose unfamiliar labyrinthine streets would provide an almost impassable barrier to five thousand three hundred men. The princess’ invasion would be reduced to guerrilla warfare. It is agreed that if the Moltus can be crossed, the south approach will by all accounts be preferable. The plan, such as it is, that is arrived at is to get as close as possible to Blavek and see what happens. Once they reach the near bank of the river it can be decided whether to follow it to the north bridges or to try to cross it and attack the palace from the south.
Before the hour is out, the army has left the town’s limits and, cheered by a few dozen sleepy-looking citizens, is on its way to Blavek.
CHAPTER TWELVE
COMPLICATIONS, ALWAYS COMPLICATIONS
Payne Roelt’s flight to the castle at Strabane is being frustrated, as is Payne Roelt himself. He has only himself to blame, however. The amount of wealth he has plundered from Tamlaght, virtually the entire liquid assets of the country, as represented by cash, gold, silver, jewels and jewelry, fine and decorative artworks and so forth, in the agglomerate amounted to a sizable physical mass. There was, he discovered, scarcely enough available large wagons in the city and its environs capable of carrying his vast fortune. Already there is a congested mass of wagons, horses and drivers blocking the central plaza of Palace Island, overflowing into the open lots on the south shore. It nearly drives him mad to see his hard-won fortune being so cavalierly handled. Incalculable wealth is there for almost anyone’s taking (though who there is to take it is beside the point). That even one of the drivers might help himself to a handful of coins or a silver goblet or picture frame is a possibility that drives Roelt almost to distraction. And the dungeons, which he had converted to makeshift vaults for his treasures, are still only half emptied.
Over a period of months he has managed to secretly transfer an enormous portion of his loot to the distant castle, in relatively small increments, a wagonload here and a wagonload there, with guards upon the guards, ineffectively disguised as itinerant merchants. Perhaps as much as half of his fortune is already secreted at Strabane. Now, with an army almost within sight, he feels compelled to finish the job overnight if possible.
“You can send these wagons to Strabane,” suggests Praxx, “and reload them when they come back.”
“What?” shrieks Payne, looking at his general as though the man has suddenly lost every one of his senses. The ridiculousness of the idea seems hardly to require refutation . . . he would have suspected the general of making a joke if he hadn’t known the man is totally humorless. How could he possibly trust anyone to take his wealth to Strabane unattended? Who can he entrust it to while he is in Blavek? At the moment, Strabane is occupied only by an elderly caretaker and his wife. That the old couple would scarcely be capable of carrying away even a small bag of paper money, let alone thirty or forty wagons-full, is a question that is not at the moment capable of entering the charnberlain’s mind. And if he accompanies the treasure shipment to the castle, who would guard what remained in Blavek? Praxx? The king? The latter he discounts, as does everyone else these days, but now he looks at the general in the revealing glare of a whole new light. Would Praxx really be capable of absconding with half of the cumulative wealth of Tamlaght?
Who wouldn’t?
concluded Payne, predictably.
The original problem not only remains but is getting worse. The news of the approaching army is disturbing, made even more so by the reports . . . more than half discounted . . . that the long-missing Princess Bronwyn rides at its head. If that proves to be indeed true, Payne thinks, he believes that he’ll go mad.
“How much money do you have on you?” he asks the general.
“Pardon?”
“How much money do you have on you? In your pockets.”
“I have no idea. Why?”
“Would you mind looking?”
Puzzled, the general turns his pockets out, laying upon a tabletop a small pile of bills and coins. Payne counts them, sorting them meanwhile into neat piles, organized by denomination.
“Two hundred and seventy-seven crowns and sixty-six poenigs,” he announces. He is quiet for a long moment, then asks, “Where did you get this money?”
“Get it?”
“Yes. Where did you get it from?”
“Why . . . why, I really can’t say, exactly. I always carry a few hundred crowns around with me. In fact, I’d thought that I had more than that.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“I don’t understand.”
“When I asked you how much money you had, you said that you didn’t know. Now you say that you thought that you had more than two hundred crowns. Did you think that you might have had three hundred?”
“It’s possible.”
“Four hundred?”
“Well, yes, I have carried that much.”
“Five?”
“Perhaps not on a regular basis . . .”
“Do I pay you this much money?”
“Pardon?”
“How much do I pay you?”
“Well, I don’t really get paid. That is, I don’t receive any sort of regular salary, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Then where does your money come from?”
Praxx is beginning to dislike and distrust the tone the conversation is taking. Payne’s last words were spoken through nearly clenched teeth, and the chamberlain’s normally pale features had become as glossily white as a good quality gruyere.
“It’s from a kind of petty cash fund, I suppose,” says Praxx, carefully. “I help myself to what I feel I need; I fill out vouchers; for my everyday expenses, you understand. As a military officer, everything I need is otherwise provided for me.”
Without another word, Payne scoops the money off the table and drops it into a cloth bag he produced from somewhere. He turns to the king, who has given up a paint-by-numbers project . . . more or less thwarted by missing his cups of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, and has returned to one of the crossword puzzles that Praxx had given him. “Ferenc!”
“Eh?” the king replies, distracted from his crossword book. He has been laboriously transcribing a lengthy word from the answer pages, “overcrafty” as it happens, and unknowingly has been chewing on the wrong end of his pen. His lips are stained and when he speaks his teeth are outlined in black as though they had been cut from a woodblock print. The effect is a little ghoulish.
“Give me your money,” demands Payne.
“What money?”
“Look in your pockets.”
The king searches his smoking jacket, vest and trousers but can only produce a five-poenig piece. Payne takes it from him.
“I was saving that,” protests Ferenc.
“Five poenigs? What for?” says Payne, dropping the coin into his bag, where it clinks with its fellows.
“It’s new. It has my picture on it.”
“So what?” replies the chamberlain. “Praxx, take this bag down to the wagons. And while you’re there, see if there can’t be more wagons to be found in this city.”
“Yes, my lord,” answers the general, bowing before he backed from the door, something he has been neglecting to do for many months. Once in the corridor beyond, and on his way to the plaza, he finds himself in an uncommonly good mood. Both the king and his chamberlain are as mad as . . . as . . . he can think of no appropriate similes, having no imagination. It didn’t matter; they are mad all the same.
What wonderful possibilities,
he thinks, mentally rubbing his hands together (one is occupied with the bag of money . . . and thinking of this, he removes a handful of bills and transfers them to his pockets).
The national economy has collapsed, people are literally starving in the streets, what of the government that has not fallen prey to Payne’s pogrom is either ineffectual or insane, an invading arrny of mercenaries is already within a few days’ rnarch of the capital, without having met even a token resistance and, what seems like a miracle, the infamous Princess Bronwyn is apparently alive and well.
Praxx cares not a whit for the treasures of Tamlaght; the only treasure he can see is Tamlaght itself. Soon Payne will be gone, retired to the retreat he has built on the Isle of Langerhans, where he will presumably spend the remainder of his days counting his money. The king is of no consequence; a trifle. In the coming chaos he will simply . . .disappear and, Praxx suspects cynically, never be missed. The only effective military force is the Guards, and they are under his control; to be accurate, not
military
in the usual sense. They are specialists: a band of carefully selected sociopaths who will be extraordinarily and enthusiastically effective in controlling the civilian population.
The only difficulty Praxx can see is in finding a suitable head for the new government. He does not consider for a moment setting himself on the empty throne. As has been pointed out elsewhere, General Praxx’s ambitions are moderate and self-interested. He would be content with being one step down from the apex of the pyramid. He wants to exercise power, not represent it.
For a brief, unlikely moment, the thought crosses his startled mind that perhaps the princess might consent to take her brother’s place. What an extraordinary idea. Yet, he considers before dismissing the notion, why not? As far as he knows, her only motive for all of her recent behavior is revenge upon Payne Roelt, whom he knows she loathes almost as much as Roelt does her. With the chamberlain gone and unlikely ever again to appear, and with the king . . . deposed . . . she would have everything she has been campaigning for these last two years.
Why not?
he repeats to himself, trying to remember anything specific about the princess’ personality and then realizing that she has always been something of a nonentity to him.
As the general came into the sunlit plaza, the confusion strikes him like a physical blow. Scores, probably hundreds, of carts, wagons and vans are crowded willy-nilly into the square. They all seem to be wanting to go in as many different directions as there are vehicles, with the result that the entire mass circulates ponderously and randomly like a pot of boiling beans, but ultimately was going nowhere. Tempers have become short, if nonexistent, in the heat, which reflects from the flagstones in palpable, visible waves. Drivers scream and curse at their horses, their assistants, the Guards, each other and Musrum; their whips crack at the flanks of steaming, foaming horses, as well as their fellow teamsters. There are fistfights; those that the Guards can reach are being broken up by freely used truncheons. There are half a dozen dead or dying horses. There are a dozen overturned wagons.
And all the while an endless chain of Guards are carrying bags and chests from the palace and depositing them onto a mound that only grows higher and higher.
Praxx, who considers disorder second only to a rectal itch as an undesirable, has to forcibly prevent himself from issuing the orders needed to untangle the mess. He has to remind himself that he really has no particularly good reason for making Payne’s escape any easier. He finds one of his Guard officers, a harried-looking man in a disheveled uniform.
“How are things going, Captain?”
“You can see for yourself, sir. There’s no organization at all: none of the civilian drivers will take our orders. Each one wants to pick up his load and be on his way. There’s no cooperation at all! And I hesitate to use force, sir.”
“You’re doing fine,” says the general to the surprised Guard. “Carry on.”
Praxx makes his way around the periphery of the plaza to his office, which is on the opposite side of the island-bridge from the palace proper. There he finds waiting for him the information that he had more than half expected to hear: confirmation that Princess Bronwyn is indeed at the head of the army she had raised in Lesser Piotr. There is no question in his mind what her goals are, nor does he question that the stubborn girl will not stop until she has achieved them. Her army is disturbingly close, less than half the distance that separates Whuttley from Blavek. It would never have gotten this close had things been different; if it had been up to him, it would never have left the coast where it landed. But Payne had gathered the Guards around himself like a protective shield, a barrier of men more than a hundred deep.
It doesn’t matter much to Praxx whether he obeys the chamberlain’s orders or not, his ultimate goal, he has decided, is best reached with the maximum amount of chaos. Following Payne’s wishes will accomplish that as well as any alternative might, and there are one or two other advantages: it will be as well for Payne to think the general still loyal to his interests, at least as long as the chamberlain is in the country; and while he still entertains the possibilities of offering the throne to Bronwyn, that contains risks, and life might be a little less complicated if she were to die in the storming of the capital. There is as good a chance of that happening as of anything else; if she survives, then he would see what there would be to see.
There is little chance that the princess’ force would attempt to attack the city from the south, the Moltus is unbridged and is too broad and deep to ford. Any attack will necessarily come from the north, across the bridges where the river is narrowest, where the bulk of the city insulates the palace. It would be easy to defend the bridges, and Blavek proper can be saturated with the Guards that Payne has gathered around himself. If the princess’ forces manage to get into the capital, the ensuing no doubt prolonged battle would complete the destruction of the city, and when Blavek finally collapses so too would Tamlaght, like a great bull struck to the heart.
Praxx, issuing the appropriate orders, can’t see any way in which he can lose.