A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (17 page)

A large stream, some tributary of the Moltus, no doubt, is pouring into the crater from its upper rim, tumbling in a frothing cataract over, under, around and through the confused mass of shattered rock, finally disappearing through a gap in the lower rim, below Bronwyn to her right, beyond which it is lost among the trees. She realizes immediately that it would be possible to pick her way from boulder to boulder, making a circuit midway between the edge of the cirque and the shallow pools at its bottom, but there would be no way to do it without presenting an excellent target for anyone standing where she is now.

“Keep on going,” says Thud to the princess, slipping his bulky pack from his shoulders.

“What?”

“Just go, please,” he answers while wrenching a massive oak branch from where it had wedged itself in falling from the edge of the cliff above them. It is as long as the girl and as thick as one of her thighs.

“You’ll never be able to stop them with that!”

“Sure I can! They can’t see me before coming around this bend. I’ll surprise them.”

“You can’t! There’re too many! And as soon as they find out what’s going on, they’ll pick you off from above. They might try to take me alive, but they don’t care about you!”

“I can at least keep them busy. If I don’t try, they’ll catch us for sure. I know it’s not much of a chance, but it’s the only chance you have. Don’t you see?”

Bronwyn does see. She has seen from the first that their flight is hopeless and that Thud’s ambush, while ultimately futile, is her only chance to gain a lead. But she is loath to abandon her friend. If she leaves him, it would be the last time she’d see him alive. And what would she do without him? She’d be alone.

“Princess, all the things you told me, about your brother being king and that fellow that wants to ruin everything and those letters and all; I don’t understand it all, but it sounds a lot more important than me. I know what’s worrying you: you’re worried about me dying. Well, I’m going to anyway, I guess. But if I do I’d like to die for something. I’ve never done anything important before.”

“All right, Thud.”

Thud is wrong in one point in his argument, however: Bronwyn is not so much concerned with what his dying meant to
him
as by what his death would mean to
her
. At the moment, her thoughts are not occupied with the potential reality of a very nice person being dead, they are occupied with the terror of having to be alone, and alone in a trackless wilderness to boot. However, if the choice is between them both dying or just Thud dying, it isn’t a difficult one for her to make.

“Maybe you’ll kill them all!”

“Maybe. I’m sure going to try.”

“Well, good luck!”

She begins to turn from him, half of her mind thinking that Thud is stupid to stay behind, the other half thinking herself incredibly lucky that he
is
so stupid. No, she suddenly contradicts herself, he is
not
...hasn’t she just been telling people that he isn’t? He’s being...decent, and it has nothing to do with the Princess Bronwyn. He’s just doing what has to be done. Impulsively, and before her normal personality can reassert itself, she pulls the surprised Thud to her, hugs him around what passes for a neck and kisses him quickly on his cheek.

“Goodbye, Thud!”

Before either one can say anything further, and sparing both a great deal of embarrassment, there came a crashing from nearby.

“They’re here! Hurry!” says Thud, hefting his club and taking a step back toward the bend in the trail.

Bronwyn hesitates only an instant, then turns and flees toward the falls. There is no longer any path; she has to hop and scramble from stone to stone, and most are lubricated with dark green algae and moss. Behind, she can hear surprised shouts and a single shot but doesn’t dare turn to look. When she finally reaches the cataract, she is forced to pause, daunted by the cascading water. There is the sound of another shot and a rock by her foot explodes. She turns then and sees a terrific battle taking place at the rim of the crater. Two Guards are down, one lying at Thud’s feet, the other draped across a rock several yards below, trickles of blood candy-striping the green stone. Two others are wrestling to pass Thud while at the same time trying to get an opportunity to use their sabers. The last two have retreated to climb higher up the rim of the cirque. They have no clear view of the fight taking place below them but they do have an unimpeded prospect of the girl, not a hundred yards away. They try another shot and this one passes through the pack Bronwyn is wearing, from side to side. Thus encouraged, she leaps into the stream, bracing herself against the water crashing against her at several angles from above, trying to find footing on the slick, polished rocks. Another bullet flies past her ear like a meteor.

It is rapidly getting dark and the cirque is awash in amethyst light. Very soon she will be invisible within the mosaic of darkening shadows. She has her sights set on a mass of angular boulders on the far side of the stream that would easily provide shelter against the marksmen, who would be no more likely to try navigating the rocks in the dark than she.

If she had her sights set lower, however, she might not have placed her foot on a rock that has been carved by the rushing water into the shape of a scoop. It is as smooth as glass and lubricated by a thin coating of algae. Her foot shoots out from under her and she lands back first in the rushing water, only the cushioning of the clothes-filled pack preventing her spine from breaking. The stream spins her in a half-circle, rolling her down the rocks for several yards. She catches herself when her left leg jams into a cleft. This saves her from a precipitous tumble into a shallow pool twenty feet below but wrenches her knee painfully. She heaves herself half-sitting, sputtering and coughing a lungful of water, catches at a dry rock and pulls herself onto a kind of spur between branches of the cataract. Rolling onto her stomach, she turns her face toward her enemies.

Thud has one of the Guards pinned to the rock face by the simple expedient of leaning his vast back against the man, while the other has finally gotten enough clearance to pull his saber. Thud parries the first two blows with his oak bludgeon, then jams the end of the log into the man’s face. The saber doesn’t have the mass to deflect such a heavy weapon and is sent flying over the brink, winking purplely in the dim glow of twilight. The Guard stumbles backwards, his last step being into space, and he follows his weapon down to the rocks below.

Then something happens that Bronwyn can’t believe. There is a splitting, ripping, cracking, shattering sound, like Musrum tearing the seat of his titanic trousers. The rim of the cirque on which Thud and the remaining Guard are battling slips away from the surrounding rock like a calving glacier. Bronwyn sees the two men, momentarily, stuck to the face of the collapsing wall like flies on a swatter, before an explosion of dust and earth envelops them. The cloud rushes over her, damping the sound of the avalanche. The thundering crash threatens to pitch her into the cataract as the ground bounces in empathic response to the landslide. The dust remains hanging in the air as the echoes died. The bowl-shaped cirque holds it cupped, as though the motionless atmosphere itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what unimaginable catastrophe has just occurred. The dust blocks the glow from the twilit sky; the crater is filled with obscurity.

“Thud!” Bronwyn cries again and again, but there is no answer other than the irresponsibly careless laughter of the stream.

She continues on as best she can. The temperature has dropped rapidly once the sun sets. She is wet through and through and shivers violently. Her knee is swollen and each step makes it throb painfully. She is no longer on a route that circumnavigates the crater but is instead more or less descending into its depths. She is beyond the cataract, or at least its main course since she is still splashing through icy rivulets. It is one of these that nearly finishes her right then.

The darkness within the crater is treacherous; the princess has to feel her way from one smooth, slippery boulder to another. Her only consolation is that it would be equally difficult for the remaining two Guards to follow her. With any luck, she hopes, they’ll break their necks. But then, her luck as of late hasn’t been so very good, she decides, and it might very well be her own neck in jeopardy. She would be relatively safe until morning if she can use every moment to increase the distance between herself and her pursuers. Safe, that is, from capture or murder. Death from accident is imminent; she risks disaster with every step she takes. Any broken limb would immobilize her: she needs arms and hands as well as legs to navigate the wilderness of boulders that fills the bowl of the cirque. If anything like that happened, and she isn’t discovered, she’d quickly die of exposure. Still, the crater is not that large. Has it been daylight, she could have scrambled out of it in a matter of minutes. As it is, she will have to be extraordinarily lucky to reach the opposite rim by dawn.

Her luck is not extraordinary. She steps into a rivulet winding from between a pair of mammoth rocks and her foot shoots from under her. She lands in the stream, her breath knocked from her in a grunt, slides a yard or two, bounces with a sickening crunch against some rocks and suddenly there is nothing beneath her. There is a split second of vertigo before she finds herself plunging into water over her head. It is as though she has been suddenly imbedded in a slab of black marble. She has no sense of up or down. She thrashes wildly, panicked, and swallows water. Suddenly her head breaks the surface and she gasps a lungful of air before the waterlogged pack pulls her back under. She wrestles out of it, thrusting herself back to the surface. She discover that she is in a small pond. In the starlight, she can see the ripples in its surface and above her the black silhouette of the ledge from which she has fallen. A foot-wide torrent arches from its lip and splashes into the pond with a hollow gargling. The edge of the pool is only a few yards away and she pushes herself toward it. Her swimming abilities are limited to a kind of dog-like crawl, which is severely hampered by the sodden clothing that is probably doubling her weight. Grasping at rocks and the gnarled driftwood caught between them, she drags herself from the water. She lies for a few moments, legs still in the icy pond, letting her retching stomach pump the water out of her. Now Bronwyn really is freezing. She is exhausted and the fires of her metabolism are burning low. She is wet to the skin and has no means of creating a fire. Blankets and extra clothing are at the bottom of the pond. She now realizes that, even wet, their woolen layers would have insulated her from the cold air that is pouring into the cirque from the mountains above it. Against the indigo sky she can see the lower, downhill rim of the crater. It is only a few score feet above her but she has neither the energy nor the courage to go any further.

She crawls entirely onto the shore and stumbles, half-erect, half on her hands and knees, well away from the water. She collapses once again. The forest groans as its vertical masts stir together in the breeze and midnight stalks down from the clouds. Her eyes close and she begins to feel a warming numbness crawling up from her fingertips and toes, as though those limbs are gradually dissolving. A seductive drowsiness blankets her and she gratefully wraps herself in it.

Something like an alarm must have been ringing in her subconscious for a long time. She answers it like a dreamer being aroused from a deep sleep. She forces open a leaden eyelid and realizes, I’m letting myself die! It is a disagreeable realization. Death is altogether too pleasant a sensation, she realizes; it came too easily and is much too welcome. She stirs and sees a pit only a few feet from her head, a velvet blackness against the carbon black of the boulders around her. When she forces herself to move toward it, she nearly screams from the pain in her leg. Dragging herself into the hole, she lets herself slide down its gentle slope. It is filled nearly to the brim with leaves and pine needles that have sifted down from the surrounding trees. She burrows into them. A sweet, resiny, earthen odor fills her head. The deeper she digs into the pit, the warmer she feels. Finally, she stops. Surrounded by the natural warmth of the mouldering vegetation, blanketed from the freezing air by its soft layers, she drifts into a fragrant sleep.

It is well into the following day when she crawls from her sanctuary, like a hedgehog emerging into the spring from its winter’s hibernation. She looks like a freshly exhumed potato. Stretching a dozen aching joints and muscles, Bronwyn reviews her situation, which is a depressing thing to do. She has lost her only friend as well all of the food and supplies he had been carrying, to say nothing of the spare clothing in her pack. She has only a vague idea of where she is or the direction in which she has to continue. Her only remaining possessions are the clothes on her back ‘such as they are) and the leather satchel containing the letters, which is still securely strapped to her chest. She takes an anxious moment to check this and is relieved to find the packets still dry and safe.

Well, now what? It is at least a lovely day; the pewter light of the winter sun is filling the rocky bowl like a sweet, clear syrup. Its rays are warming but the air is still cold. Seeing that the rim of the cirque is not far away, she decides to postpone any additional worrying until she has climbed out of at least one depression. Once on the rim, she hopes she will have raised both body and spirit. There is a nearly vertical stone wall before her, but even before reaching it she can see a narrow path snaking up its face, reaching the parapet after a couple of tight switchbacks.

She has limped only a dozen yards up the path when a Guard steps out of a crevice. His dull black captain’s uniform had hidden him within the shadow. Now he looks like a scorpion blocking her path, brandishing his saber like a stinger. She can see that the man has suffered no better than she has. She finds this gratifying. His plumed shako is gone, as are his cape and gun. One black boot has been shredded from ankle to knee. A sleeve is nearly torn free at the shoulder and its epaulet is missing. Blood trickles down the back of that hand and his black-mustachioed face is colorful with bruises and smears of green slime and dried blood.