A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (6 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

A FAREWELL

Baron Milnikov paces his cell nervously and precisely; it is neither more nor less than ten and a half paces plus a fingerwidth in one direction and eleven paces and two finger-widths in the other. His thoughts are occupied by betrayals, as well they might be. He has been terribly betrayed by Payne Roelt and his gang, which has been accomplished at the cost of his only daughter’s life, or so the villains are trying to convince him; and he in turn has betrayed Princess Bronwyn, whom he has loved openly as a daughter—and secretly and painfully as well. And, so far as he knows, this has cost her her life as well.

His enemies are obviously taking no chances with him. His cell is in the bottommost dungeons of the palace. Its walls are made of massive blocks of dark grey stone, set without mortar, and so large that only eight or nine compose each wall. The rough surfaces are perpetually moist; thin threads of water dribble down them constantly, forming puddles on the uneven stone floor that never dry. The stones are slimy with an evil-looking grey-green algae, and his clothes are becoming moldy as he wears them. Chunks of blackened cloth come away with his fingers. He has no doubt that he is well below the level of the river.

The only door to his cell is a solid mass of oak, so old as have become completely petrified. Not that it matters: everything that he can have conceivably used as an instrument has be taken from him, from shoelaces to belt buckle. A clever man can have done a lot with a good aglet.

The only access through the door is an opening about eight inches square near the floor, normally securely sealed by an iron plug. It is through this that he is passed his water and food (stale bread, from which he usually have to scrape a dank, black mildew; cheese that is either as hard as a brick or soft and furry with mold; and occasionally a chunk of an unspeakable sausage: a tube of undercooked gristle and grease that he have not been able, as yet, to bring himself to eat). He is not allowed any utensils. Through the same opening he has to pass his chamber pot.

He sees nothing of his jailer, other than an occasional glimpse of five hairy, knotted knuckles.

There are, of course, no windows. The only light is that which leaks around the door. Lanterns must be kept burning in the corridor twenty-four hours a day, and there is consequently no sense of the passage of time.

It had taken the baron no more than half an hour to familiarize himself with and to memorize every detail of his prison, such details as it possessed. He is impressed with its historicity: he discovers, laboriously engraved in the adamantine walls, unfamiliar names accompanying dates from more than two hundred and fifty years earlier. He decides that he would, at the last, eventually add his name to the anonymous roster. It might, perhaps, give some future historian or biographer a thrill. He envisions a time long after Roelt and Company have passed, as he still has no doubt they will, and the secret places of the palace are opened to tourists as a kind of cautionary memorial, and that there would be a plaque commemorating the site of his imprisonment.
Ah
, they would say to themselves or aloud, pushing their children, if they have any, shouldering others aside if they didn’t, toward the roped-off doorway,
look there . . . that’s where the great, brave, sad hero Baron Milnikov is held prisoner for so long!

“Really, dear Father?” some handsome, intelligent lad might reply. “The very same wonderful Baron who’s in my favorite books?”

“The very same, my son.”

“Golly whiskers!” would be the breathless reply as the good child presses for a better view.

“The Baron in my books,” continues that precocious and adorable tot, “can have gotten out of
this,
I bet!”

“Ho! ho!” replies the parent. “Yes, I’m certain that the
legendary
Baron Milnikov can have, but you do know that there is a
real
Baron, too, and his story is far more tragic and heroic and brave than the book Baron.”

“Oh, do tell me the story of the real Baron Milnikov, Dear Papa, for he is my greatest Hero!”

And the father and son would go out into the sunlight and the older would relate to the younger the baron’s true story and his greatest adventure, and both would finish with tears in their eyes and the boy’s sworn resolve to grow into just such a great man as Milnikov have been.

I’d rather be out of here,
the baron decides at last,
and let the effeminate little brat grow up to be the thug he deserves to be.

But even the resourceful baron can think of no way out of this cell and, so far as he knows, there is no Thud, Gyven or Bronwyn to help him. And if there is anyone to blame for their absence, he broods ruefully, if unfairly by two-thirds, it is himself.

Oddly, the baron does not concern himself overly with the report that his daughter, his real daughter, Tholance is dead, primarily because he does not really believe it. What, he tells himself, can the villains possibly hope to obtain by her death? It is only by being able to threaten her extinction that they have any hold upon him. Nothing would be gained by actually carrying through with the threat, especially so long as he continues to be cooperative. Although he considers the king, Payne and Praxx to be virtually dysfunctional sociopaths, even they, he is convinced, would see the pointlessness of killing the harmless child.

But why, then, tell him that she is dead? What is the idea behind that? Nothing more than a perverse desire to torture him? How can that possibly encourage him to continue his cooperation? The answer is that they are mad, of course, and therefore irresponsible and incapable of being understood by a rational human being.

Instead, he sets his mind to work on the problem of escape. The fact that it is on the face of it patently impossible only increases his interest in the puzzle. He’d never yet failed to escape from any situation (he had been working on a foolproof scheme to escape Kaposvar when the princess and her friends mtervened) and he sees no reason why this should be any different. It is also possible, perhaps, that he is beginning to believe that he is in fact interchangeable with the impossible baron in the dime novels that bear his licensed name.

For several weeks his only contact with the outside world has been a brief glimpse of a hairy forearm twice a day as his keeper passed food to him and collected his chamber pot. After a dozen attempts to cajole and trick whoever was at the other end of the gnarly limb into saying a word or two, he gave up. Eventually it occurred to him that if it was impossible for him to even
see
his jailer, let alone communicate with him, it was equally impossible for the other to see or communicate with the baron. The person on the far side of the door only knew of the baron’s presence because the food disappeared and the chamber pot was regularly filled. What if his captor was to be denied even those rudimentary reassurances of his existence? How much would it take to inspire curiosity? If, in fact, there actually is an intelligence at the opposite end of that unprepossessing appendage.

Although the baron’s scheme does not require much intelligence on the part of his keeper, it would be costly: it requires a fast that would last for days, nor is he able to do more than wet his lips with the water he is given, for fear that even the slightest drop in level might be detected. Eventually he even abandons that and resorts to licking the drooling walls or soaking a piece of cloth torn from his shirt and wringing the green liquid into his mouth. At first it is no sacrifice to ignore the loathsome food he is given, but after the second day it becomse a torture to allow even that miserable allotment to lay for hours no further into his cell than the hairy-knuckled hand had pushed it. The same hand would reappear half a day later and pull the untouched food out. Have the change in routine been too subtle for his jailer to have noticed? Has there been any comment when his chamber pot is no longer passed through? It is as though there is only a mindless machine on the other side of the door. What if, believing him to be dead, the supply of food is stopped altogether? The baron resolves to give the guard’s curiosity another forty-eight hours, which is as much as he thinks he himself can bear.

In the meantime, Milnikov listens carefully, his ear pressed against the cold, wet iron. He never hears any voices, or at least any sounds that he can be certain are voices, but he does become conscious of something that mystifies him: rumblings like heavy trucks with iron wheels rolling across cobbled floors. The sounds come and go constantly. It is as though he is in the depths of a mine. What can it mean?

Four more times the hairy hand pushes a bowl of food and a cup of water through the opening and four more times the untouched food is fetched back through it. The baron has never dreamed that the miserable crusts and soft grey sausage can ever possibly look appealing. They still do not, but the
possibility
is becoming ever more tenable. What is hardest to bear is the ever-increasing stench. The cell is absolutely unventilated and the baron begins to actually fear for his life in reality.
What a dreadful and ignominious way to go, asphyxiated by my own excretions.

The meal delivery after the fourth one is late. The baron begins to worry that perhaps his plan has been oversuccessful. What if the mere assumption that he is dead is sufficient for his enemies? What if they do not even care enough to look inside the cell to see for certain? The last food delivery may very well have been the last one forever.

The water has made him ill. He suffers from severe abdominal cramps, fever and, horror of horrors, diarrhea. He has become dehydrated, but there is no longer even the stale water that had been provided, and the thought of consuming more of the greenish tricklings from the cell’s stone walls literally nauseates him. The pangs of hunger have long since passed; in any case they would have been indistinguishable from the cramps from which he is now suffering.

Another day or two go by, at least so far as the baron can tell.
What a stupid way to commit suicide.

The rattling of keys is scarcely sufficient to rouse him from his stupor. Something of his poor brain remains sentient enough to ask the question:
Wouldn’t it be a waste to have gone through all this for nothing?
The remaining part of his brain replies
, So what? Let’s eat!
But that part is not as influential as it is merely argumentative and the baron finds himself rising to his knees and dragging himself alongside the door. Just in time, too, for at that moment the massive slab swings open like a vault.

“Musrum’s holy boogers!” comes a high-pitched voice, such as a man assumes when he thinks he is imitating a woman. “Ah,
gee
! He must’ve been dead for days! Ahhh, man, they oughta just wall this cell off!
Phoowee!
”

There is not another sound for a minute or two, obviously to allow time for a little oxygen to penetrate the chamber

“You gonna leave it open like that?” asks a second, barely audible voice. “You wanna stink up the whole palace?”

“I’m not goin’ in there ‘til some of th’ stink is gone.
He’s
sure not goin’ anywhere.”

“I guess not. Least not in one piece, anyway.”

“Yeah!
Snk! Snk! Snk!”
the first replies with what must have been a laugh.

“You’re gonna need a coupla buckets, man!”

“I ain’t in no hurry to mess ‘round with a stiff that smells like that either. Why don’t you go an’ get me some sacks?”

“Where do I get sacks?”

“How’m I s’posed to know? Use your ‘magination.”

“What’s that?”

“Try the kitchen, stupid, they’re always gettin’ sacks o’ potatoes an’ things.”

“All right. And I’ll ask if they got any magnation while I’m there. Is it any good? Sounds foreign and I’m not too partial to foreign food.”

The baron hears shuffling and scraping footsteps begin to move off.

“Better bring a more’n a couple,” calls out the first voice, still near the door.

For several minutes there are only faint, indecipherable sounds of movement. Would he not come into the cell until the other returns? The baron begins to forget his physical agony in his anxiety. He wants to make some sound to attract the warder and has to force himself to remain silent and motionless. Gradually the shuffling sounds grow closer and the baron holds his breath (for which he hardly needs any inducement). A shadow appears, lapping over the threshold. There are muffled sounds of disgust but the shadow does not recede. Instead it lengthens, an odd misshapen thing.

At last its creator appears framed in the doorway. The baron silently flattens himself against the wall. The warder, he sees, is a dwarfish, lumpy individual, whose face is not much further above the floor than the second button up from the baron’s belt buckle (when he still had one). The arms are disproportionately long, however; had they not been grasping the handle of a broom, the familiar hairy knuckles would have rested on the floor. The arms are massive and, in themselves, well developed . . . just misplaced, as though they have been transplanted from a wrestler or prizefighter. The remainder of the warder is disappointing: a shapelessly miscreated creature, just shy of being a full-fledged hunchback, but then again just shy of being fully human as well. Its mismatched eyes have just begun to turn in the baron’s direction, one slightly ahead of the other, when the latter reaches out and snatches the broom from the startled fingers. The warder’s slow brain has not begun to react even by the time the baron has stepped behind him and placed the broom handle across his knobby throat. Only then, when the pressure begins, does the massive arms begin to flail at the constricting rod. The baron keeps his face well back from powerful-looking fingers that snap at his nose and eyes like angry crustaceans, while at the same time he presses a knee into the small of the dwarf’s undulating spine. After a very short span of time, and without a sound, the dwarf collapses to the flagstones, though slumped might be perhaps a more accurate word; he is so short there is little significant difference between erect and prone.