A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (8 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess Online
Authors: Ron Miller
Payne is the first to regain his composure, or at least he makes a plausible show of doing so. “Well, well, the good baron of all people. What in the world are you doing here?”
“Nothing that you’ll enjoy hearing about.”
“You sound more than a little put out, my dear baron.”
“
Payne
!” squeaks the king, from behind the chair where he has taken refuge. “Payne! What does he want? What does this mean? Get him out of here!”
“Where’s my daughter, you illegitimate son of a streetwalker?” replies the baron, ignoring the king as everyone else is.
“Your daughter?” Payne’s eyebrows raise in mock surprise. “Why, I’ve already told you: she’s dead.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Whyever not?”
“What would be the point in killing her? What can you hope to gain?”
“Gain? Nothing at all.”
“My daughter’s continued safety is your only hold on me. Kill her and there’s nothing you can threaten me with. Do you think that I would’ve betrayed my princess for any other reason?”
“Why, I have no idea. Would you have? To be honest, the thinks that you might’ve been purchased more cheaply never crossed my mind. Perhaps I might’ve saved myself a great deal of trouble. However, I see what the source of your confusion is. You’ll probably laugh when I tell you. You’re assuming that you have some continued value to me, but really you haven’t. All I wanted is for you to abandon the princess to me. You did. And that is all.”
The baron is growing very pale at Payne’s coolly self-confident recital. “Then if you’re finished with me, why not let me take my daughter and leave?”
“For at least two good reasons, Baron. The first, of course, is that I cann’t let you loose to warn the princess or otherwise interfere, which I’m sure you would, although I have every good reason to believe that any threat from her is by now a very moot point. The second, and no less compelling reason, is that your daughter is, in fact, no longer of this world.”
“But
why
?”
“Because she is deceased, of course.”
“No, no! I mean, why did you have to do that? What harm have she done to you?”
“
Harm
? None at all.”
“Then why did you . . . do it?” The baron’s voice has sunk to a hoarse, and suddenly very elderly, whisper. He has finally come to the realization that he believes, at last, really believes everything the villains are telling him.
Payne looks genuinely surprised, as though he had never before considered the question. He shrugs his shoulders. “To tell you the truth, it just seemed to be the thing to do.”
With an almost inarticulate cry (a strangled attempt at
Bastard!
) the baron throws himself at the smaller man. Taken almost completely by surprise, Payne is only just able to avoid the slashing point of the baron’s sword. He falls backward against the chair upon which he had been negligently leaning, its horsehair stuffing spraying from the three-foot slash in its fine leather, knocking it over with a crash as the enraged baron presses his attack. Fortunately for the next few moments of the chamberlain’s life, the baron has gone too mad to ply his weapon scientifically or artfully, and the opening portion of the battle consists only of a furious hunt-and-chase amongst the king’s furniture. The king himself has taken refuge in a corner, where he huddles, holding a silver serving platter as a shield. He peeks around it with eyes as bulging and glossy as hard-boiled eggs as he watches with a kind of morbid fascination his furnishings being reduced to splinters.
“Do something!” shrieks Payne, as he scrambles around the chamber, barely maintaining a hair’s-breadth lead. The general has been, so far, for whatever reasons he saw fit, content merely to watch. He is in fact wondering how close he would be able to call this.
“You murderer!” cries the baron. “You destroyed my daughter and my honor! I’ll dice you, I’ll mince you, I’ll flay you alive, I’ll peel your skin from you like an apple and roll you in salt. I’ll cut your fingers off and make you eat them. I’ll break every bone in your body and tie you into knots . . .” There is a great deal more in the same vein and Payne has no reason to doubt the sincerity of even a single word of it.
“
Praxx
!” he squeals once again. “Do something, damn you!”
Praxx, without any particular sense of urgency, other than what is required to avoid the general meleé, goes to the mantle and pulls down a sword from a pair that are crossed above the stone shelf. He waits until the chamberlain in his rounds of the room passes by him, and hands the weapon to the nearly exhausted man. This is less help than he had hoped for, but Payne turns to face the baron, only just in time to parry a thrust intended for the back of his head.
“How long do you think you can keep this up?” he asks the older man.
“Until you’re cat food, germ!”
“I think not! You’re old and tired and starved. And there’ll be help here any moment.”
Attracted by the noise, perhaps, thinks the baron, but he is certain that he has noticed no one approaching the bellropes. And why is Praxx staying out of things as he is? What is
his
game? The small, dark man is now fighting back, and with surprising, if purely academic, skill.
“A moment’s all I need, parasite, weasel, tick, as far as you’re concerned, tapeworm.”
“Your precious princess is dead, too, you know!”
“I very much doubt that,” he replies uncertainly.
“Why? You didn’t doubt me when I told you that your daughter is dead, why do you doubt me now?”
“My daughter is a helpless little girl. The princess isn’t. I don’t think you
can
kill her.”
“I didn’t have to; she is drowned at sea!”
“Don’t make me laugh! That’s the best you can do? You’ve thought she was dead half a dozen times before and you were mistaken. What a joke you are, Roelt! What a pitiful jest!”
“I’ll show you who’s a joke, baron!” the chamberlain hisses as he presses his defense. The tiring baron feels his advantage weakening. He is exhausted, and starved, and what Payne Roelt has told him about his daughter has deflated too much of his resolve. There is no glorious rescue to anticipate now, no joyful reunion; only whatever revenge he might be able to enact.
“Your precious, precious princess!” taunts Roelt. “I know all about
that,
all about your terribly ‘noble’ interest in her.” He laughs sneeringly. “‘Noble!’ Ha! You’re only a disgusting old man, a leering pedophile old enough to be her father. What did you do all of those nights the two of you spent together, eh? I know how you feel about her, it’s no secret, not from me, nothing is. How was she, Baron? Did you make her squeal?”
“
Damn you!”
cries the baron, inarticulately, his weakening offense now only managing to hold its own against the other’s defense.
“Or did you just worship her from afar? Spend long nights looking at that slender young body? She’s casual in front of her underlings, I know; how often did she flaunt herself in front of you? Do you think she knew what she was doing? Do you think maybe she
enjoyed
watching the old man sweat and fidget?”
“Damn you!” the baron splutters in his rage and humilation. “You
dare
talk about her that way! I’ll cut your filthy tongue out! I’ll make a paté out of it!”
“A little too close to the truth, eh, Baron? How, ah, ironic, how sadly romantic that she’ll never know how much you loved her, isn’t it, Baron?”
“She knows I love her!”
“I’m sure she did, but not
how
you loved her. What would she think if she are to know that all you really wanted to do is spread . . .”
With an animal-like scream the baron attacks his enemy, surprising both himself and Roelt with the energy and ferocity of his assault.
This is it,
he thinks, as his disembodied viewpoint drifts toward one corner of the room and he is able to look down upon the scene below
. I let him get to me, like the rankest amateur. I’m too old and too tired; too hungry, also. Now look at what I’m doing: red-faced, wild-haired, slashing at that little monster as though he are a fly.
He sighs as best as a disembodied viewpoint can
. It’s all come to this, then. I’ve betrayed everything that I’ve ever cared for, and to what purpose ? I’m really not certain. I’m sorry, Tholance, I’m sorry, Tamlaght, and I’m sorry, Bronwyn, for this miserable creature knowing so much of the truth.
The chamberlain feels his ground giving rapidly away, nearly as quickly as his confidence.
“Praxx, damn you! Do something!”
So Praxx raises his pistol and shoots the baron.
CHAPTER FIVE
PRISON AGAIN
The passage of the Strait of Guesclin is the worst experience, out of many highly qualified contenders, Bronwyn had had to date, or at least so she thinks at the time. Perhaps it is the immediacy. In actual fact, there had been little physical discomfort, a small thing to be thankful for since the difference is more than made up for by an almost unbearable quantity of sheer terror. She had exhausted her reservoirs of adrenaline, leaving her suprarenal glands as shriveled as raisins.
Her trials, and those of her friends, are by no means over. In fact, the passage of the Strait had been in a real sense merely a diversion, a prologue. They had been starving and in desperate need of fresh water before and they are still in that same state now, though their need is now even greater. Bronwyn has had neither food nor water for more than three days. The lack of food she can bear, and in fact much of the pain of her empty stomach has passed, but the lack of water is something that is beyond the scope of merely being bravely borne. It is terribly urgent.
They are now drifting somewhere in Solsonna Bay. Bronwyn asks the professor if that means some possibility of landing in Londeac, perhaps at the coastal town of Spolkeen-on-the-sea.
“I would doubt it, Princess,” he replies. “The current from the Solsonna, combined with the flow from the Strait, would keep us from approaching Londeac.”
“If we’re carried into the South Sea, we’re lost!”
“Indeed.”
“If we don’t get water soon,” puts in Basseliniden, “we’ll only last a few more days at best, anyway.”
“Don’t you know some way of making some fresh water?” Bronwyn asks Wittenoom. “Distilling or filtering, or something?”
“There are many ways, or, rather, many ways of accomplishing the same thing, since distillation is the only way I know of to remove dissolved salts from water. Though bear in mind, please, that it’s not really my field.”
“Isn’t there
something
you can do?”
“I’m afraid not. I can do nothing with my bare hands and we have little else.”
Solsonna Bay is scarcely more than one hundred miles wide so, at worst, land can not be more than fifty miles in any direction but south. South there is nothing. Yet south is where the current is inexorably taking them.
On the second day after the passage of the Strait, the fifth without water, Bronwyn has a terrible nightmare of granite walls blurred by express-train speed, though her dream has turned everything ninety degrees, so she feels as though she is falling down some bottomless shaft. There is no raft, and neither captain nor professor: she is alone in her precipitous plunge. Above her the receding tunnel narrows, vanishing into a darkness that somehow seems to leer at her, an unlikelihood that can only occur in a dream; below, a void that is simply empty. Things drop past her, flaring like meteors, evanescent bursts of light like moths flown too close to a flame. In each dwindling ash she recognizes someone: Janos the gypsy, Baron Milnikov, Thud, Mathias, Gyven . . .
As Burgos and Melfi pass her they ask,
Have you learned what your lesson is yet?
And all she can think to answer is:
Leave other people’s mail alone?
She awakes looking into the concerned faces of the professor and Bassiliniden. She is drenched in perspiration and her face is wet with tears she can ill afford to lose, and from the way her companions are holding her she knows that she must have been thrashing, perhaps even convulsing, in her sleep. She feels as exhausted as a well-wrung dishrag. It is daylight; for the past several days she has been spending more time asleep than awake.
“I’ve destroyed everything I’ve touched, everyone I’ve met,” cries Bronwyn in distress. “I’ve made a hellish mess of everything.”
“Nonsense!” says Basseliniden.
“Don’t say that! How can you know? Would you be here now if it weren’t for me? Would you, professor?”
“No, but . . .”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You’d still be in your laboratory, doing whatever it is you do, and the captain’d still be on the
Sommer B.,
smuggling and pirating. But that’s not all. What about all of the other people? I’ve told you about some of them. What about Thud, and Gyven, and the baron, and Mathias, and the gypsies and all of the other people who’ve helped me? I’ve repaid them with little else than unhappiness . . . and . . . and some of them have even died, Musrum help me. I’ve blamed my brother and Payne Roelt all along, but it is really me that killed them. Me and my selfishness and blindness.”
“Princess,” says Wittenoom soothingly, frightened by the hysterical edge to her voice, “you forced no one to do what they did . . .”
“Yes I did! Yes I did! It is because I
am
the Princess Bronwyn that they did these things. Their lives were ruined, they died,
because
I’m the princess. They felt bound to. They had to do what they did, just as though I had held a gun to their heads!”
“You don’t think that they would’ve helped you if you hadn’t been the princess?”
“Why would they?”
“They are all good people, Princess.”
“That’s easy to say!”
“Why do you think
I’m
here? I have no allegiance to you, and the captain here, I understand, is both an outlaw and a kind of anarchist. He’s certainly unimpressed by your status. Why would we risk our lives for you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re exceptions. Maybe you’re both mad. But that doesn’t change anything. I’m still responsible.”
Much to her companions’ distress, the princess begins to cry: frightening, desperate sobs. It is something she very rarely did and it is a terrible thing to see.
“Princess . . .” offers Basseliniden.
“No! I’m
not
your princess! Don’t cail me that! If anything, I’m your murderer. I’ve killed you both! How many more will there be? How many more?”
“Princess, don’t!”
It is clear to both the professor and the captain that their friend is in acute distress. They are listening to a brain driven to distraction by dehydration, hunger and guilt. The girl has become hysterical and the two men, not knowing what to do, do what little they can to calm her, but to no avail. She is as strong as either of them, certainly stronger than the scientist, and they can not control her. She breaks from their grasp and plunges across the raft, making it rock wildly.
“Princess! Be careful!”
“Princess! No!”
But neither injunction comes in time, not that it would have made any difference anyway: the distraught girl has thrown herself from the platform into the surging grey waters around it. The two men rushe to where she has disappeared but there is no sign of her other than a widening circle of ripples.
To Bronwyn the sudden impact of the icy water as it closes over her is almost unbearably shocking. She feels her hysteria fall away from her like the shattering of some fragile glass shell. Her eyes are open and, now that she is below the surface, the once leaden water looks brilliantly green. It is a translucent greenness that presses against her eyes; she can see nothing else around her, not even her own arms and hands. At first she thinks that she has relapsed into another nightmare. She seems, at first, to be weightless and motionless, suspended like a fly in amber. But an increasing pressure against her eardrums and an increasing inequality in the light, which is now clearly brighter above than below, convinces her that in actual fact she is truly under water—and sinking.
What in the name of Musum am I doing?
She begins to struggle out of the clothing that is dragging her down, suddenly aware of the very little breath left in her lungs. Already she desperately wants to inhale and it takes all of her will to override the urge to do so. She has no idea how deep she is, there is no sense of a surface above her, only the softly glowing greenness, as though her eyes are coated with a translucent jade glass. Kicking free of the encumbering clothes, she tries not to panic, but rather to pull for the surface as strongly as she can.
In less time than it seems, she can see the reticulated patterns of the waves above. Unfortunately, at the same time, she knows that she has used the last molecule in her lungs. There is nothing left. She makes one, last, powerful effort to reach the air that lies on the other side of the wavering membrane when, her involuntary instincts out of control, triggered by the superabundance of carbon dioxide in her system, she gasps for breath at almost the same instant she breaks the surface. Almost immediately, she sinks again, though not without hearing a shout.
Then she realizes that she has made a Discovery.
She thrashes with her arms and legs with renewed urgency and this time, when her head and arms appeare, they are grasped firmly by her friends’ hands.
“Princess!” cries Basseliniden, who is now in the water with her, supporting her with his long arms. “Princess! It’s all right, it’s me!” She can not tell whether the water that streams from his face is mixed with tears, and, truth to tell, she did not pay much attention. The princess has obviously come to her senses.
“
Fresh
!” she chokes.
“Calm down, we’ll have you back on the raft in a second.”
“No, no! The water! The water is
fresh
!”
“What?”
“She’s still delirious, the poor thing,” remarks the professor from the raft, as he leans over its edge to help hoist the sodden girl back on board.
She is forced to retch quarts of water onto the deck before she can reply. Her lungs feel as though they are on fire.
“No . . . you don’t . . . understand,” she gasps as soon as she can say anything, each word feeling like a hot coal. “The . . . water . . . it’s fresh!”
“What are you saying?” asks the captain.
“What does it . . . sound like?”
“Here, take this,” offers the professor, seeing the princess beginning to shiver, and hands her his jacket. The sleeveless undershirt and brief shorts she had been left with are glued to her like a thin layer of wet plaster. Meanwhile, the captain has leaned over the edge of the raft and is cupping a handful of water to his mouth.
“I don’t believe it!” he cries. “The water
is
fresh!”
“I told you so.”
“How’s that possible?”
“I’ve been recalling something . . .” murmurs the professor. “We must not be far from the coast of Tamlaght.”
“So?”
“If that’s true, land can’t be more than a few miles away . . . probably just beyond the horizon, which, as you must know, is not very far away seen from so near sea level as we are. Perhaps but a mile or two.”
“But the mere proximity of land wouldn’t make the water fresh!” protested the captain.
“Oh yes, that. Well. Not far from the town of Hartal-around-the-Bend is the justly famous Wookertwine River . . .”
“I know it!” interrupts Bronwyn. “It disappears into a cavern . . . it becomes an underground river!”
“Exactly! And which direction is it flowing when it disappears?”
“Toward the sea, like any other river.”
“And it continues to flow toward the sea, underground, eventually beneath the bed of the ocean itself, finally coming to the surface again in a gigantic underwater spring!”
“An underwater spring?” repeats Basseliniden in amazement. “But surely even the largest river cann’t freshen an entire sea. And the Wookertwine is by no means a very large river.”
“It needn’t be. The area of fresh water we are in is no doubt very small. When it escapes from its underground source, the fresh water, being so much less dense than the surrounding salt water, immediately rises to the surface, with very little mixing, like a column of hot air on a cold day. We must be directly above the egress. This is a hitherto entirely unknown phenomenon that the princess has discovered.”
“I’m speechless,” she says.
Refreshed, albeit still hungry, the trio of castaways put their minds to the problem of reaching the evidently not-too-distant shore. Hartal-around-the-Bend, the professor announces, is the nearest village, which sits on the bank of a river (not the famous Wookertwine, however) that flows into a small, circular bay, too shallow for anything but the small fleet of fishing boats from which the inhabitants earn their precarious existence. Bronwyn and the captain try to rig a rudimentary sail, using the professor’s blanket, to take advantage of the light breeze that is wafting toward the west, and the raft, indeed, seems to make a little progress in that direction, albeit with agonizing slowness. They are still a mile or more from the entrance to the embayment, and a few small buildings are already visible on the shore, when a half-dozen boats appear from behind its sheltering arms. They are evidently small fishing craft whose hulls are still invisible to the low-lying castaways.
“We’re saved!” cries Bronwyn.
“We’ll see,” replies the captain.
Before the princess can question Basseliniden’s pessimism, the professor says, “We should try to signal them if they come close.”
“Can’t they see our sail?” the princess asks.
“Maybe,” replies the captain, “but it’s not very large and it’s dark-colored. I wish we had something light-colored to make a flag of.”
“Don’t look at me,” says the princess. “I have few enough clothes left as it is. If the two of you tie your own shirts together, that should make a large enough flag for them to see.”
The captain and the professor removed their shirts, and by lacing them together as best they can with what little bits of twine and string they can scavenge, made an irregularly shaped banner of about two square yards. Fastening this to the oar, they are able to extend the signal flag well above the masthead.
“If the tide doesn’t turn before we’re in sight, they should spot us,” says Basseliniden.
And he is entirely correct. Before half an hour has gone by they see that one of the now not very distant boats has turned in their direction. A few minutes later figures on board the approaching sloop can be perceived and one of them is waving at the castaways. Bronwyn returns the signal enthusiastically, but does not particularly notice that her companions aren’t.