A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (20 page)

The firm massaging recreates muscles, untying them from complicated knots and manipulating them into their proper places. Wrapped in a tent-like towel of the Kobold’s cardboard-like fabric, she pads barefoot behind the woman as the Kobold leads the way back to the princess’ chamber.

There she finds Thud waiting with the clothes she has carried in the pack, now dry and neatly laid out on the bed. She is especially delighted to see the pair of thick woolen blankets that Janos had given her. She chooses trousers and a soft flannel shirt from the collection. As she dresses, she says, “Thud, do you have any idea at all about where we are?”

“The king says we’re in his kingdom.”

“Well, yes; but where is that?”

“Right here.”

“You don’t find any of this strange?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, I mean, for example, you look like all of these, um, people.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, look, I don’t know how to put this, but haven’t you ever feel, well, ah, different? I mean, look how big you are, for instance.”

“Oh that.”

“Where we came from, everyone looks like me, more or less, isn’t that right?”

“Naw. You’re real pretty.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You mean little?”

“Yes. But here, you’re actually only medium-sized.”

“Yeah. I noticed that. It makes me feel kind of funny.”

“I can imagine. The king makes you look like a baby. But don’t you think that this place is strange, too?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been outside the City before. Isn’t this right?”

“Only in fairy tales, Thud.”

“No one ever told me any fairy tales.”

“Maybe you’re making up for lost time. Do you know where we can find the king? I’ve got a lot of questions to ask him.”

“I guess I can ask.”

“Please do. And that’s another thing, Thud: just how is it that you can speak the language?”

“Why not?”

“Can you speak it before?”

“I don’t know. I never had to.”

She suddenly stops the process of dressing herself. She realizes that she is still extremely hungry, more so than ever, in fact. She pulls off the trousers and climbs back onto the big bed. She explains her need to Thud, who speaks to someone at the door. Not too many minutes later there is a discreet knock and Thud admits a Kobold who is carrying a tray loaded with covered platters. Bronwyn squats cross-legged and allows the tray to be placed on the bed before her. She lifts the cover from one of the dishes.

“What
is
this?” she asks, repelled by what is revealed.

“Food,” answers Thud.

“It looks more like something a cow coughed up.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“All right, then, what
is
it?”

“Well, those things there, the grey things, they’re what-do-you-call-ems? The things that grow in wet, dark places?”

“Mushrooms, I hope?”

“That’s what they are, mushrooms!”

“I know what mushrooms look like.
That
is fungus.”

She lifts the other covers warily. There are things made from lichens, and it got much worse.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” offers Thud.

“You’ve tasted this stuff?”

“Maybe if you don’t look at it, it won’t seem so bad.”

“It’s too late. I’ve already seen it.”

Inquiry brought an invitation to join the king in his throne room early the next day. Bronwyn awakes that morning without the sense of urgency she ought to have felt. She is not feeling any of the hurry and bustle normally attendant on an immediate departure. She is already becoming accustomed to a subterranean existence; she has almost ceased to think of the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, houses or towns, in fact, about any of the terrestrial necessities. The artless unimagination of the Kobolds is like an hypnotic drug. She is certainly in the midst of more adventure than she had ever hoped to attain. If that indeed has been her goal, as she had once believed, why is she so anxious to move on? Why is she so keen on continuing toward her cousin’s camp? She is out of the palace, beyond the influence of Payne or her brother, in fact, they probably assume her to be dead. She is her own mistress now; an entirely new life is before her, if she wishes to begin it. Why then the compulsion to plunge back into the old one? As she dresses, she tries to puzzle it out.

Perhaps Janos and Marishka has overestimated her...they has not reckoned on her pride, stubbornness and vindictiveness, to say nothing of her powerful sense of self-interest. Neither has she, if it comes to that. Not necessarily altogether commendable qualities, especially when taken in combination, she decides, but they are hers and people will just have to learn to deal with it.

She finds herself angered beyond measure that her enemies are undoubtedly at this very moment gloating over her defeat and failure. And that is all the motivation she needs. She goes alone, accompanied only by a Kobold guide. She is left to wait in what she guesses to be an antechamber. It is already occupied by a small figure she recognizes immediately.

“Henda!”

The boy rises at the sound of her voice. In spite of his dolphin smile she knows that he is unhappy, as a blind man’s hands come to replace his eyes, Henda’s eyes have gained the ability to show all the emotion his mutilated, frozen face is denied expressing.

“What’s wrong?”

He only shakes his head slightly.

“But something
is
the matter?”

Henda fumbles in his pockets for a moment, and pulls forth a stub of charcoal and a scrap of brown paper. He scribbles on it briefly, then hands the paper to the girl.

“thar iz nuthin rong [says the note] i am afrade uv makin yu sad.”

“‘Making me sad’? Why should you make me sad?”

Henda retrieves the paper, but before he can form a reply, there is the sound of a huge gong and the doors in the end of the room open. Two Kobolds step forward through the door, and turn to escort Bronwyn and Henda into the throne room. The two humans follow them.

The room beyond the door is a great chamber that Bronwyn catches herself thinking of as cavernous, but then, of course it is. It is not as large as many of the others she has been in, but it is certainly the most beautiful. She would have credited the Kobolds if she had not already known them to be incapable of such artistry. The vaulted roof is supported by buttresses of prismatic black basalt; crystals of every kind encrust the walls like fungi on a tree stump, but of sizes, colors and shapes that take Bronwyn’s breath away. She has not been a good student of geology and can identify by name little of what she sees, but she recognizes the glistening fool’s gold of iron pyrite: its intersecting cubes looks uncannily artificial and the golden crystals are a foot or more on a side; wine-colored tetrahedrons of amethyst each the size of her head, clusters like grapes; and sheets of delicate mica, like insects’ wings, that hang in curtains. There are incrustations of garnets and pendants of rutilated quartz grew from the ceiling like rock candy chandeliers. The same sourceless, phosphorescent light that illuminates the rest of the Kobolds’ world washes in incandescent, reticulated patterns over the surfaces, as though she were at the bottom of a sunlit pool with the Kobolds in the room looking at her as dispassionately as a school of goggle-eyed groupers. King Slagelse sits upon a raised dais at the center of the chamber, the sawed-off stump of a giant stalagmite, surrounded by a dozen or more of his Kobolds. Their round grey bodies looks like a collection of dinosaur eggs.
No, not quite right. More like spider’s eggs in a jewelry box.

“We welcome the Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy,” says the king politely.

“Thank you, your, um, Highness. You’ve been very kind.”

“The princess is now sufficiently rested and recreated? She has slept well and has eaten?”

“Yes, your Highness. Physically I’m well enough, but I remain very confused. What is this place? I don’t understand at all where I am.”

“Yes! All in good time! The princess will please trust us? First, we would like to introduce you to Thud.”

Bronwyn blinks twice. Her friend isn’t anywhere in the room, so the king’s unexpected words simply do not make any sense to her. Nor has she any reply that makes better sense. Then she realizes that as the king is speaking, the man beside him has taken a half-step forward. It is he to whom the king has introduced her. The man is a
man
in fact: he is positively human, and, she notices with not a little consternation, almost supernaturally male. And he no more resembles the Thud she knew than he does Omar the Wonder Fish ‘her favorite storybook character when she had been a child). He does not appear to be tall, though that is mostly due to the giant Kobolds who surround him. He is in fact a full head taller than Bronwyn, whose own scalp is elevated to an even six feet when she wears sufficiently thick-soled shoes. He is spectacularly muscled; his body looks like a relief map of the mountains above them. That ruggedly fleshed topography looks to her like a sculptor’s rough sketch for an unfinished statue, carelessly hewn from an oak log by an adze. It possesses the flinty, chiseled leanness of musculature developed through hard daily labor, rather than conscious, deliberate exercise. His arms and thighs are fasces of steel rods, his stomach as hard and rippled as a wave-lashed beach. Like everyone in the chamber save Bronwyn, he wears only an asbestos breechclout; Bronwyn finds herself unexpectedly, and surprisingly, stirred. Never before in her life, outside of artwork, and little enough Tamlaghtan art features nudes, given the Church’s constipated views about the human body, has she seen a naked male human being, and this man is within a very few, albeit significant, points of being as nude as a human can get. When she reluctantly moves her glance to the man’s face, she realizes with some shock and not a little distress that the quality of incompleteness is carried through here as well: looking into his eyes is like looking into a pair of clear glass marbles, she is willing to swear that she is looking right on through the back of his head. There is no more intelligence in them than if he actually were a statue of stone or wood.

“Who is this?” she asks the king.

“That is something it will take some time to explain. Does the princess truly wish to know?”

“There are many things I’d like to know, your Highness. And if I have the time...”

“Thud has told us something of the mission the princess has set for herself,” says the king, seeming to change subjects all too easily. “She has certainly gone through a lot of difficulty.”

“It hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be.”

“But what is?” offers the king. “It has been hard for us to truly appreciate the princess’ adventures, or to truly comprehend what would drive anyone to such extremes. So little changes here, she must understand, that change itself is forgotten. It is always the same. Always.”

“I wish I can say the same for my world, your Highness.”

“Can’t the princess? It would seem to us that the very world she came from is as changeless as this one.”

“I don’t think your Highness understands.”

“Do we not? We are not as ignorant of the surface world as the princess and her people are of ours. But we are not speaking of that large a scale, but rather only of the princess’ world, the princess’ personal one, the one the princess is fighting change to return to.”

“No, I...”

“We have gotten around more than the princess would believe. Our lives are not confined to the caverns and mines, at least not entirely. The people who live in the forests and mountains, and in the littlest, most remote villages, still leave milk by their hearths for us, just as they have done for countless generations. And we still accept these offerings, as we have done for equally countless generations. Their food truly is nothing to us: what are a few drops of disgusting milk or indigestible crumbs of cheese to our thousands? No, it is a contract that we are faithfully fulfilling. Has the princess read much of the folklore of her land? No? A shame; and she is wrong, if we may be so bold as to say so: they are not mere fairy-stories. There is so much to explain, then. Where to begin? Does the princess know the origins of her own race? First, would she care to sit? It is not necessary for her to stand in our presence.”

“Forgive me, your Highness,” answers Bronwyn, a little coldly, “but if I stand it’s because I choose to. I’m not one of your subjects. I’m the daughter of a king, as you obviously know very well, and I’ll sit if and when I please.”

She then takes one of the seats at the base of the dais. It was made for the scale of the Kobolds and made her feel like a doll, rather spoiling the effect of her speech.

“Yes! Of course she can! Of course! She is quite right! We are very stupid; she will, of course, forgive our tactlessness?”

Though the king’s expression is as changeless as Thud’s has always been, and as unreadable, Bronwyn now detects a subtle hardness in his speech, however pleasant and innocuous it remained. She wonders if perhaps she might not have made a mistake in her assertiveness.

“Of course. It was rude of me to correct you. Your Highness had asked me a question?”

“Yes. We are wondering what the princess knows of the origins of her own race?”

“Well, the Book of Musrum tells us that He created the first people from rocks in a field, but I don’t know if I really believe that. It’s not what the natural philosophers say, anyway. They think we came from bugs and things.”

“The princess must not be too quick to doubt. The story told by her people is not very far from the truth. It has only been retold from the peculiar viewpoint of the surface dwellers. Listen then: in the very beginning of time, Great Musrum created a race of near-gods, for He is very lonely. The princess can imagine the loneliness of a god who has all the infinite universe to Himself? Musrum created a race of giants, the Kobolds, to keep Him company. He gave us the safekeeping of the treasures of the richest of all the worlds in His universe. That is why we live underground, where we can be caretakers of Great Musrum’s wonderful minerals, His succulent ores, His graceful synclines and fluent anticlines...”