A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (2 page)

What girl?

That’s none of your business!

It isn’t?

No, it’s not!

Okay.

She hears the big man starting to chisel on a stone.

Stop that!

All right.

Look, have you seen anyone?

Who?

The girl! The girl! Have you seen her?

Who?

The girl!

What girl?

What girl?
shouts the Guard.
The girl hiding in this building!

Where?
rejoins the big man, anxious to help. The Guard calls him an idiot and orders his men to search the room. There is a great deal of noise, which ceases presently. The floor vibrates again from the weight of the armed men, followed by a long silence. Long enough that the girl begins to have renewed fears about suffocation and entombment, and imagination though it might be, it is becoming extremely difficult to breathe.

The sarcophagus gives a groan and a line of light suddenly appears where stone had met floor. It is dazzling to the girl’s eyes and she squeezes them shut against the pain of rapidly constricting irises. When she opens them a second later, the great block of stone is gone from around her and in the arms of Thud, who is setting it down a few feet away, with a thud of its own. It is only at that moment that the girl fully realizes what the big man had done: overturned, the hollowed-out block looked exactly like the solid, unworked cubes that ponderously

littered the room. It would have strained anyone’s imagination to have suspected that a girl was inside one of them and the Guards notoriously lack that useful mental faculty. It does not occur to her ‘and least of all to Thud) that the ploy had been a pretty astute one for someone of Thud’s

obvious limitations.

The big man turns to her with his forefinger upraised to his lips in the sign for silence. He crouches down near her, folding up on invisible joints like a collapsing blimp ‘or a failed soufflé, to maintain the earlier culinary simile). Seen from a distance of only three feet or so, Thud’s face is a marvel to the girl. She has never seen anything even vaguely similar to it; what amazes her is the gradual realization that she likes it. The head is as smooth, round and featureless as a mushroom; the mouth a slit so wide that the entire top of the head threatens to hinge over backwards whenever he grins, an action that serves to expose a pink cavern full of gnarled yellow stalactites and stalagmites, behind which lurk a restless, scarlet tongue, like a fretful blindworm. His eyes, as socketless as a mole’s, are bright black beads nearly a hand’s-span apart. Roughly between them is a kind of lump that might be a nose or might be a wart. Thud by all rights ought to be monumentally ugly, though he isn’t. It is difficult to explain why, and, in all the time to come that she is to know him, the girl certainly never even considered trying; but perhaps it is because the face radiated an uncomplicated kindness the way a burning coal fills a hearth with warmth. That is one possibility at any rate.

“Please,” whispers Thud, “be very quiet. Those men are looking for you, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do that made them so mad?”

“I didn’t do anything!” she lies, but Thud does not know that yet.

“That’s good.”

“I can’t stay here!”

“Oh, sure, they might be back, all right,” agrees Thud.

“But I can’t leave, either.”

“They’d spot you in a minute,” agrees Thud.

“I have to get out of the city! I must!”

“I bet,” agrees Thud.

There is a silence between them, since there isn’t much that can be said after that; the conversation is going nowhere. The girl’s sadness lacerates Thud’s heart; he has no idea what he can do to relieve it. His great hands wrestle with one another, like a pair of small dogs roughhousing. The rough skin sounds like millstones grinding. The girl looks up at him with eyes that are like the peal of bronze bells. An idea squirms its way to the forefront of Thud’s consciousness, where his mind’s eye blinks at it in unexpected and unfamiliar realization of his genius.

“I can get you out of the city.”

“
You
can? How? When?”

“I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you.”

“Thank Musrum!”

“It’s a way I used when I was a kid”, the girl finds it impossible to create a mental image of the giant as a child; the picture leaning more toward something like a pupae than anything human, “but you’ve got to get out of here first.” Thud rises to his feet and goes over to the big window with the kind of ponderous grace a cow affects, and occasionally achieves. He leans out over the sill and gives a good, long, hard look in both directions and then returns to the girl, still with the unhurried deliberateness of the truly bovine.

“There’re Guards in the street. They’re likely all over. If I can get you out of here, I can get you home. Then it’ll be easy.”

From his workbench, Thud selects a large chisel, nearly as long as the girl’s arm, with a blade as sharp as a razor. It winks at her conspiratorially in the window light. Thud jams its cutting edge into a chink between two of the wide floorboards and bears down upon the opposite end. The board lifts with a protesting screech. Moving down its length, he repeats the action two or three times until an entire ten-foot-long slab of thick lumber has been pried from its moorings. Rusty spikes hang down from the moldy underside like miniature stalactites. A hundred annoyed spiders drop from it and scurry for cover.

Thud gets down on his hands and knees and drops his head into the rectangular hole. He looks up and says, “Come on, this way!” as spider webs floats from his face and a small insect, panicked, disappears over the curve of his head like an arthropodal Magellan.

The girl looks into the hole with extreme distaste. She imagines a thousand unwinking little eyes gazing back at her. “In there?” she asks, unnecessarily.

“
Please
,” the giant begs. She reminds herself that there are, probably, worse alternatives. She has seen some of them. In fact, it is just because she knows there are worse things than a damp hole, slimy with grey fungus and alive with invertebrate things, that she had been forced to flee her home, and that is why she climbs down into the darkness after only that single moment’s hesitation. She leaves shreds of her rumpled dress festooning the splintery edges of the narrow slot, which is perhaps just an inch less wide than it should have been.

Whether or not she thinks of it, the girl should be grateful for her boyish silhouette. The earth is only about three feet below the floor. It is covered with a kind of grey-green gruel of mud, decomposing wood and the dust of limestone and marble. Her feet sink into it until her ankles are buried. It sucks at her feet when she tries to lift them. She looks up at the gargoyle face that hovers over her head, round and pale and grinning like a moon.

“Turn around and crawl,” it says. “You’ll see a little bit of light. Head for that. When you get to it, stay there. Wait for me.”

“But...”

“Hurry!” he urges, and she has to duck as he replaces the plank over her head. A dozen sharp blows rain dust and crawling things down upon her as Thud resets the nails. It is absolutely dark, with the exception of the thin lines of light between the floorboards. They recede from her in either direction like an elementary exercise in perspective. They stripe the contours her body so that she looks like a topographic map of a teenage girl. She turns around and sees the patch of grimy-looking daylight that Thud mentioned. It looks about a mile away. She makes certain her leather bag is strapped tightly across her chest and begins crawling on all fours toward the glimmer.

The glutinous slime covers her legs halfway up her thighs and, worse, up to her elbows. Each time her hands sink into the sediment she can feel it writhe around her fingers. Her dress, already ragged, clings to her like papier-mâché. Half sliding, half crawling, accompanied by sounds very much like a cow sucking on its cud, she makes her way toward her goal, such as it is. The squarish satchel on her chest acts like an anchor, dragging in the slime, dredging up malodorous bubbles that burst flatulently beneath her nose. She discovers that the light is an opening between the floor level of the building and the cobbled alleyway. The opening was created to act as an outlet for the drainage of moisture from beneath the building. It is working as intended and a stream of tepid, mucus-streaked fluid leaks from the opening; it then flows over the cobbles into the central channel that drains the alley. She tries to straddle the flow, but it runs over one ankle and a hand, and within inches of her nose, which, not for the first time in her life, she wishes was not so long. She tries not to think of any of the several possible sources of the liquid.

Keeping her head within the shadow of the hole, she peers as far into the street as she dares. One black-uniformed Guard stands at the entrance to the main thoroughfare to her right ‘the street Thud’s large window overlooks), and another Guard has just turned the corner to her left, walking in her direction. She withdraws further into the darkness. The Guard, attracted perhaps by a hint of movement, a shadow within a shadow, or noticing a possible hiding place previously overlooked, comes toward her. She has no place to go where he won’t be able to see her if he bends down and looks into the opening.

The Guard approaches within a few feet, draws his saber, and begins to squat on his haunches, turning his head so he can see into the hole, trying to minimize his proximity to the fetid drool issuing from it. The girl feels her stomach wrench with the expectation of immediate capture when something warm and furry scuttles over her legs with icy little feet. A rat the size of a pampered house cat brushes under her nose, its cold, naked tail gives her lips a snide fillip as it heads for the street. It runs out between the Guard’s legs. He leaps erect with a cry of disgust and strikes at the rat with his blade, drawing a spatter of sparks from the pavement, but the animal disappears into the jungle of crates, ashcans and garbage with a supercilious chuckle.

The Guard flings a curse at the vanished animal and continues on his way. The girl thanks Musrum for rats. A shadow falls over the opening once again, and again she shrinks from it. This time a familiar voice husks, “Girl? Are you there?”

She cautiously pokes her head into the open air. Thud stands there, towering over her like a captive balloon. He holds a large stained canvas bag in such a way that it shields the girl’s hiding place from the two Guards at the end of the alley. He is busily picking up bits of broken wood and tossing them into the bag.

“They already checked the bag. They think I’m just getting firewood.”

The girl crawls out of the hole and into the protective screen created by the bag. Thud casually bends to wrench a slat from the side of a fruit crate. As he places his foot against the box to brace it, he lets the near edge of the bag drop free. It falls to the cobbles, making a yard-wide circular opening. From the point of view of the Guards, the bag remains unchanged. The girl needs no prompting to catch onto the idea and scuttles into the bag instantly. Thud tosses the broken wood on top of her and moves on down the street. The entire act has taken but a moment and there has not been even a second’s suspicious hesitation in Thud’s movements. He stops twice more, piling more scrap into his sack for realism’s sake, waves to the Guards, who good humoredly wave back at the enormous half-wit, and disappears around the corner.

The next ten minutes are not the most unpleasant the girl has ever experienced, little, she suspects, can be nastier than the crawl through the darkness under the stone cutters’. They are, however, more painful. Thud has been overzealously conscientious in his attempt at appearing casual and tossed in the firewood with an abandon that left the girl with more than one bruise and abrasion.

Now as he strides along with the bag hanging against his back, the girl wonders if it would ever be possible to sort herself out from the scrap. The contents of the bag are being stirred into a kind of aggregate girllumber. She is almost upside down, knees pressed to her nose; the bag, none too roomy, squeezes her like a small but ambitious boa constrictor digesting a large bunny. Soon the character of the bouncing changes and she guesses that they are ascending a flight of stairs. Several flights, from the time that passes. The bag slams against a wall, first on the right and then on the left, and the girl hazards a protesting kick into the small of Thud’s back, but to little avail. The jouncing eventually stops, there is a rasping squeal, another jostle, a blow against the back of her head and the bag is set onto a floor with a thump that jars her teeth. She looks out of its opening in time to see the big man closing the door through which they has just passed. When he turns, he sees her tumble from the sack, all akimbo.

“Are you all right?” he asks. She immediately thinks of replying no, an answer for which her bruises, scratches and imbedded splinters argue persuasively. But she sees that the ugly man is in earnest; he hasn’t asked casually: he is truly concerned. To reply in the negative would be cruel; petty as well, since she
is
alive and that certainly is all right. What are bruises compared to what she knows could have happened to her had the Guards taken her back home?

“Yes, I’m fine!” she answers, gladly, pleased when she sees the worry wiped from his face by one of his astonishing grins.

The room in which she finds herself is obviously the big man’s home. It is no larger than a big closet, perhaps ten feet by twelve, which leaves little enough room to spare when the big man is at home, which is the case. There is not a right angle in it; the ceiling and walls slope together into compound angles that make the girl guess, correctly as it happens, that the room is tucked into the attic of a building. Thick wooden beams criss-cross through it, emerging from the walls, disappearing into the ceiling. The walls were once plastered but that has mostly fallen off, leaving leprous, lath-boned holes. Thud has attempted to improve on the dreary appearance this gives his home by pasting over the holes with woodcuts and chromolithographs torn from the illustrated papers. He is pleased, but this effort really only succeeds in making the room look shabbier, possibly because the woodcuts are never quite the right size or shape to entirely cover the plasterless craters. No matter. The floor’s planks are bare but very clean. In one corner is Thud’s bed: a pair of large canvas bags, like the one he has carried the girl in, sewn mouth to mouth and filled with straw. A plain little table and a chair to match ‘which latter seems altogether incapable of dealing with Thud’s immense behind) complete the major furnishings. What little else there is is quickly listed: a curtain over the single window, washed and scrubbed to colorlessness and near-transparency, a small wood-burning stove made from a discarded iron keg ‘in which Thud is now starting a fire); a wooden crate nailed to a wall that acts as both cupboard and pantry; a little oil stove on the table, next to a cracked, handleless cup filled with dirt from which springs a twiglike plant with a single leaf, and, centered on one of the trapezoidal walls, a lone tintype photograph, surrounded by pictures of flowers, some of them gaudy chromos torn from magazines and seed catalogs, others laboriously hand-colored. The silvery picture is a portrait of a pretty, thin-faced girl who looks not very much older than Thud’s foundling, except for the sad eyes; those look very old.