A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (21 page)

“Pardon me,” interrupts Bronwyn, “but do you mean that you don’t
do
anything with all of that refining and...everything you do? I mean, what’re all the furnaces and things for? What do you do with all that metal and um, stuff?”

“Oh, we certainly do something with it! We cleanse it and put it back!”

“You bury it again?”

“Of course. What else? What would
we
do with it?”

“I don’t know. Sell it or something, I suppose. Or make things.”

“For what? What for? But there is more to our story, if the princess will allow us. Many thousands of generations ago there is a kind of civil war among the Kobolds. There are renegades who are seduced by the sun, and other living creatures, creatures lower than the Kobolds who are the ideals of Musrum’s creation. Their eyes have been blinded by colors and they have an unnatural craving for open space. Their distorted minds can not stand the vaults that Musrum in His wisdom has created for our protection. They wickedly wish to abandon the stewardship He has entrusted to them.

“The war went on for many years, but we will not burden the princess with its details. Suffice it to say that in the end, the renegade Kobolds, the insane ones, to be completely truthful, took upon themselves a self-imposed exile. They left the bosom of Musrum. They went outside, into the open. There the great sun burns them like coals in a furnace, shrinking them into cinders. With each generation they shrivel more, growing smaller and smaller, darker and darker. And the generations grew shorter as well, for the further they went from the true home, the less life they are able to draw from Great Musrum. They had to grow hair on their bodies, like the animals, for protection and warmth. Soon, the most distant generations forgot their origins in the struggle for existence on the outside of the world. It is a hard world out there, as the princess must surely know, not at all what Musrum meant for His people. He meant us to be here.”

“Pardon me,” interrupts Bronwyn. “Is your Highness telling me that human beings descended from Kobolds?”

“Well, of course!”

“I have to admit it’s not the way I heard it.”

“The princess interests us...we have never heard the story from a human’s point of view.”

“Well, I’ve heard of Kobolds, of course; I told you that. It’s just that I’d never thought that you were anything real. I mean, I heard about you in stories, in, ah, fairy tales. Until now, I ‘d always thought that Kobolds wee make-believe, like fairies and giants and things.”

“Humans have forgotten their origins, then,” the king says sadly.

“Your Highness, I’m not too sure that we ever
knew
them. I mean, not the version you just told me. Not scientists and people who’ve studied such things for a long time. In school I learned that human beings have been around for millions of years, at least. At first they were just like big apes; they aren’t very smart, I suppose, though they painted pictures on the walls of the caves they lived in and they invented fire and discovered the wheel. We call these ancestors cave men.”

“Well?”

“What do you mean, ‘well’?”

“Isn’t that just what we are telling the princess? Allowing for the distortions to be expected by the passage of time, and probably a natural jealousy, of course.”

“No, the cave men are human enough. They are just big and lived in caves...” She let the argument drop, realizing that, indeed, the king has a certain point. “Well, look here,” she went on. “The cave men didn’t look anything like you Kobolds, not really. They were big, but not anywhere near as large as you, or even Thud for that matter. And they were all hairy and walked hunched over like this” ‘she demonstrates) “and they doesn’t know about metal or anything.”

“It’s not a flattering picture the princess draws, but we do find it amusing. We suppose that we had expected the surface people to have remembered their origins and the True People better and perhaps with a little more reverence. Why else do the mountain dwellers leave little offerings for us, if the Kobolds are not being honored as Musrum’s chosen? But if we had truly thought about it, we might have expected this. It must be with great shame that humans look back on the gifts they have abandoned; they see their withered, scrawny bodies and remember the giants they once had been. It is no wonder that they have protected themselves with a special retelling of their creation, one that allows them to pretend to a little dignity, to imagine that they have risen rather than fallen.”

“With all respect, your Highness...”

“It is disappointing. We thought we would be better remembered. But perhaps it has been for the best, after all. By all accounts, humans have been toughened by having to live beyond Musrum’s care; they have become ambitious and powerful. It may be as well that most of them do not believe that we exist outside their children’s stories.”

“I’m sure your Highness is right,” Bronwyn agreed, not only wondering where all of this madness was leading, but what the king’s intentions toward her really are. If being a little agreeable with the giant’s fairy tales helps to make him look upon her a little more kindly, she would gladly accept whatever he told her as gospel. This is not much better than a nightmare, she told herself, and as in any dream, good or bad, you went along with its rules.

“In any case,” the king continued, “her version of the story has a great deal to do with what we must tell the princess. We must tell her of our dealings with the surface people and we must ask of her a great favor, though we think we can make the latter more in the nature of an equitable trade in services.”

“I would be more than happy to be of service to you.”
And even happier if it means being safely on my way.

“We are delighted to hear that. Several generations ago, our generations, of course, the princess understands, one of our ancestors decided that it was incumbent upon our race to purify the bloodline of the surface people. He was a kindly Kobold, and it pained him to see how much the poor creatures suffered. He understood that it is not the surface dwellers’ fault: the terrible life they are forced to endure on the outside, their physical degeneration, all was brought upon them by the actions of a few renegade Kobolds. Why should they continue to suffer for something they had had no hand in? It is neither possible nor desirable for us to interfere with the lives of the surface people directly. But we are in no hurry: thousands of years had already passed; what would a few hundred more matter?

“The old king’s plan was a simple one: to reintroduce the pure bloodline. And his solution was equally simple: merely substitute Kobold children for those of the surface dwellers. It has not been terribly difficult to do this. There is little that occurs within or upon these mountains that we do not know about. Occasionally, when we learn of an imminent birth, we prepare ourselves. In the first night after the surface baby arrives, we make the substitution. We leave a newborn Kobold child and take the other away.”

“You don’t...” Bronwyn half cries, rising from her seat.

“Please do not look so horrified! We do not harm the poor things. We raise them as our own. They cannot help their disabilities; we pity them.”

She remains on the edge of her seat. The king has misunderstood her shock; she is not concerned with what the Kobolds do with the human children. What does she care about that?

“What you’re trying to tell me is that Thud is really a Kobold? He’s not human?”

“Of course he’s human! We would have thought the princess would have realized that by now.”

“That’s not what I mean. Thud’s one of you? He’s a Kobold? A baby you left with a hu...a surface mother?”

“Yes! Exactly!”

Well, what do you know?
She has no reason to doubt the king. As he is speaking, she recalls the story Janos had told her about the poor foundling girl whose newborn baby was so mysteriously changed overnight. It explains a lot of things about her big friend, even his choice of occupation, she suddenly realized. She supposes it is one a Kobold would naturally gravitate toward. Thud is a born rock pounder. A movement beside the king attracts her attention. It is the other Thud shifting his weight to a different foot.
Oh, my dear Musrum
, she thinks, reminded of the presence of the big nude human,
that’s the baby Thud was meant to be.
That thought doesn’t seem to make as much sense as she would have liked. She tries again.
That’s the baby Thud is substituted for. That’s a human being who is kidnaped and raised by the Kobolds, and Thud,
my
Thud, is a Kobold child, raised by a human mother. Holy Musrum, the poor thing must have known all along what her child really was!
She looks again at what she is now thinking of as the New Thud, with even more fascination, with even more disgust. Living and working with his step-people has certainly created a magnificent body, what are light chores for a Kobold would be violent exercise for a human; but living with them has, she is sure, destroyed his mind.

“We will take the princess to her cousin,” says the king, “if she will agree to take Thud to the Continent.”

“Pardon? What?”

“Thud, this Thud, must get to the Continent...”

“Socotarra?”

“Yes, Socotarra. The nation of Londeac, specifically. There is a very important mission he must perform. If the princess will help him, we will take her to her cousin.”

The king had made his proposition far too casually for Bronwyn’s taste
. It’s what he’s been leading up to all along. But he surely must want more than this.
For the first time since her arrival within the underground kingdom, Bronwyn feels definitely afraid, the fear replacing what has been a general anxiety. She knows she has been drifting through the past three days in a kind of reverie: halfway in a dream. Now she looks at the king and his retinue not as creatures of her imagination somehow brought to life, but as the grey, inhuman troglodytes they really are. The smallest of them would be capable of crushing her within its great hands like a meatball in an hydraulic press. The emotionless faces, with eyes like glittering chips of obsidian, vast lipless mouths, and no noses to speak of, are now as frightening as they ought to have been all along.

The king all along has been careful to explain that he regards her as something less than human, a degenerate Kobold in fact, physically and morally far lower than an animal. They can destroy her without compunction; indeed, they might consider it an act of mercy; they can keep her within the caverns for the rest of her life, and there has been no indication yet, she belatedly realizes, that the directions to the nearest exit are forthcoming. She would grow to be like the pseudo-Thud: as white as a slug, her body wasting on a diet of lichens, moss and fungus, her eyes atrophying in the darkness, her hair vanishing, her mind slipping from her like a sugar cube dissolving in a cup of hot water. Slagelse’s kingdom is one without art, without literature, without imagination, without change and without time, it exists in a perpetual, eventless, out-of-focus
now
that stretches endlessly without future or past.

She would have to escape by any means: the cost of staying is too dear.

“That won’t do me any good now,” she answers. “It’s far too late. My brother’s coronation begins about ten days from now and I still must be one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles from Piers’ camp...”

“Yes, about two hundred as the princess reckons them.”

“Then there’s just no way I can get to him in time for him to be able to do anything about my brother and Payne.”

“We mean it is two hundred miles as the
princess
reckons them, but not as
we
do.”

“Pardon?”

“Distances in our world are not the same as they are in the princess’. Even though it exists within hers, our world is much larger than that of the princess. We don’t know if we can explain...”

“Please don’t try.”

“What it means is that her cousin’s camp is only a very few hours’ journey from here. Perhaps only half a day.”

“I don’t understand how that’s possible, but if it’s true, why do you need me to take Thud, the New Thud, to Londeac? If you can travel two hundred miles in just a few hours, Londeac would only be a day or so away. Why do you need me?”

Slagelse sighs and shifts to a more comfortable position in his throne. He twirls the braided strands of his beard around his stumpy fingers. For the first time a certain reticence enters his voice.

“Our kingdom does not extend everywhere: the earth is not hollow. Much of the journey would still have to be made overland. We would not know our way on the surface, supposing one of us could survive any length of time on the outside. And even if our kingdom does underlie all of Guesclin, the Strait between this island and the Continent is a barrier we cannot pass. Thud, here, is our answer, or at least part of it. He is a Kobold in all ways except by birth. Our interests are his. And he can travel on the surface with impunity; he can cross the Strait, he can carry out this mission where none of us would succeed. And he is the only one of a very few who are ready...or able. Physically, that is: Thud is as ignorant of the surface as we are. He needs the princess’ help. Will she help him?”

“All right. If I can. I’ll try, at least,” Bronwyn answers, realizing that all she need do to carry out her part of the bargain would be to take this new Thud to the coast and put him on the first ship to Londeac. Her uncle, Felix, occupies the throne there and would surely help. But there is no need to let the king know how simple this would be. The more obligated he feel toward her, the better.

“I hope your Highness will understand and forgive my haste, but I’d really like to be on my way as soon as the, uh, two Thuds and I can get ready.”

“We are afraid the princess is under a slight misapprehension, only one of the Thuds, as she puts it, is going with her.”

“What do you mean?” she asks warily.

“The princess’ Thud, the Kobold who accompanied her here that is, will remain with us. Of course. This is, afer all, his home.”

“He’s staying here?”

“Certainly. What else does the princess expect?”