A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (5 page)

Bronwyn discovers how simply Thud has solved the problem of procuring women’s clothing: he has instead brought her a wide selection of boys’ clothes. And to take care of the question of fit, he has at least a dozen different sizes. Some of the garments seem intended for an infant, while others might have fit Thud himself. But it all seems a rather haphazard collection; all of the stockings, she sees, are of a single size, and that for someone half her age. On the other hand, all of the shirts are far too large. She hopes she will be able to piece together a complete costume fit to wear.

Discarding everything that is too small, she spreads the remaining garments over the floor. It all looks hopelessly tawdry and of questionable cleanliness.
Musrum! Being chased by armed Guards is one thing, but all this dirtiness
...she hated dirt...And even if the clothes were clean, there is no doubt in her mind that they have been worn in the not too distant past by people who are not only unclean but possibly even...but here her mind veers away from the approach of the awful word
diseased
.

“Oh, Mr. Mollockle!” she cries as she steps back to review the clothing strewn across the floor. “I can’t wear these things!”

“Why not?”

“Well, look! Everything’s so...ugly!”

“It looks all right to me.”

“Well, it would,” she says, unkindly.

“What can I do? It’s all I could find.”

“I suppose I haven’t any choice. Musrum! I tell you I won’t wear this stuff in daylight. I just won’t do it, that’s all.”

Thud doesn’t say anything for several long seconds. Then Bronwyn asks, thinking perhaps to change the subject, “Mr. Mollockle, is that a stream I saw down there, below this building?”

“That? It’s really a sewer. Oh, I heard that a long time ago, when this was still country, that used to be a real nice little river. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s always looked like it does now, so far as l know.”

“Do you know where the stream goes?” She has found an under vest that seems the right size, and it is clean and soft as well. She slips into it.

“I’m not sure. I guess it’d go to the river, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d think so.” She tosses aside three pairs of pants until she finds a pair of patched knickers with black pot-metal buckles at the knees. She stands, pulls them on and buttons up the fly. Not bad, but pretty loose around the waist. Well, one more use for the old cord.

“Is there a way down to the stream?” she asks as she finds a dark red flannel shirt with a faded blue check. Perfect fit! Perhaps too perfect; fortunately there is a short, belted jacket baggy enough to hide her distinctively female silhouette. She is slim-hipped and small-breasted, but not
that
slim-hipped and small-breasted.

“I don’t know. Uh, yes, I used to play down there, when I was little.” ‘Is that possible?) “I just don’t know if I can remember how I ever got down there.”

He continued shoving supplies into the same big sack in which he had carried Bronwyn the day before. His face bore its usual lack of expression.

“Did you find any shoes or boots?” Bronwyn asks, holding up her bare feet and wriggling their toes at him.

“Oh, yeah...someplace.” He burrows into the remaining pile of goods and holds up a pair of lumpy-looking short boots, tied together by their laces and looking like two elderly catfish. “I hope these fit. They’re all I could get.”

Bronwyn takes them, gingerly, as dubious about their freshness as though they has been elderly fish. She pulls them on and the fit isn’t too bad with an extra pair of socks to make up the difference. She buttons them up.

“I think,” says Thud, “we can get down to the stream through the basement.”

“All right, then; I’ll be ready in a second.” Which she actually needs several minutes’ worth of, to braid her hair into two plaits, then to coil those tightly against the back of her head. A floppy, billed cap covers her head to the ears. She would pass for a boy, more or less, at least in the dark. Thud’s improvisational foraging has provided her, unintentionally she is sure, with a fine disguise. Thud waits for her patiently, the bag lying at his feet like a sleeping hound.

She picks up her leather satchel, unbuckles it and again checks its precious contents. She feels a little silly doing that; where would they have gone? She tucks the oilcloth bundles in firmly and rebelts the bag tightly. Ducking her head under its strap, she makes sure it is held snugly under her left armpit. As most people do when they know they are leaving a place forever, she gives the room an automatic, semiconscious scan; what can she have forgotten? She hadn’t had much with her. In fact, she is taking out more than she has brought in. And a strange thought briefly crosses her mind: isn’t that the story of her life?

Her eyes rest briefly on the wall opposite the stove; the paper garden, grey, brown, umber, indigo and black in the darkness, now surround a rectangular patch of bare plaster, about the size of a playing card; the only thing Thud has taken from the room is his tintype.

“All ready?” she asks. At a nod from Thud, she opens the door as quietly as she can and starts down the stairs. Beyond the door, the building is new to her; she has yet to see anything other than Thud’s room, which she has never left until now. The stairs are narrow, with high risers and short steps. She has to be careful not to miss her footing or topple off balance. The stairs coil down through the building in an irregular helix. They pass half a dozen landings, each surrounded by numerous narrow doors. Some have been painted a bright color, most are bare wood, stained black in circles around their latches and unhinged edges from the touch of ten thousand unwashed hands. A few have a square of card or a piece of torn paper pinned to their center panels, or to frames, with a clumsily and painfully scrawled name proclaiming person here in block letters of crayon or charcoal. Most occupants, however, seem to have preferred or accepted or encouraged anonymity.

Finally reaching the ground floor, she finds herself in a hall, flanked by psoriatic stucco walls, with a large door at the end, its glass crisscrossed with wandering sutures of tape without which it would have fallen into pieces. In the other direction, the hall vanishes abruptly into darkness. Thud touches her shoulder and leads her into the ammonia-reeking shadow, plaster fragments crunching under their feet. At the end of the hall, set into a corner, is a small door. Bronwyn tries its latch and finds it is locked. She steps aside for Thud. He takes the latch in his fingers and bears down on it steadily, like an hydraulic press. There is a sharp crack and the latch and its lockbox pop neatly out of the door. It swings open easily, sweeping a fan of floor clean as it does. Wooden steps, set into a stone wall, lead down.

Using the shelter of the open door as a shield, Thud takes the lantern from his bag. It is homemade from an empty can, with the label soaked off and the metal polished, inside and out. Holes punched around its bottom seam allow air to reach the candle and a square hole cut in the side lets the light escape in a single direction, reflected from the shiny, curved inner surface. He has fashioned a conical cap out of another piece of tin and finished it with a handle made of baling wire. It is really a very neat job. He lights the candle and replaces the little metal dunce cap. A shaft of yellow light beams from the lantern’s square cyclopean eye.

Still without a word, Thud proceeds down the steps with Bronwyn close behind. It is a short flight that leads to a small, brick-floored room. All of the walls are stone. An arched passage leads to the top of another flight of steps. These also are of stone and descend much further. There is no railing and the steps are mossy, wet and rounded with use. Bronwyn hugs the damp wall, certain she is going to shoot off into the darkness with her next step onto the slimy stone, which is as slick as wet ice. She reaches the bottom dizzy from holding her breath.

She now finds herself deep within the foundation of the building. Fat columns of roughly-cut stone support a low, vaulted roof from which hang stalactites of dissolved mortar. The floor is grey dirt compacted to the hardness of cement. In the darkness beyond the glow of Thud’s little lantern, she can hear scuttling, scampering and a squeaking like someone twisting a wet cork in a wine bottle. She is reminded all too vividly of the cat-sized rat that had run past her face the afternoon before, she can still see its malevolent red eye, like a drop of blood, and the wet yellow tusks.

Following as closely behind Thud as she can while avoiding being stepped on, which would be disastrous, she accompanies him to one of the walls. It is pierced, she discovers, by a row of deep, square windows. She can feel air drifting in through them and can hear a faint trickling from the stream outside. The bottom edges of the holes are on a level with her chin.

“Are there bars?” she asks in an anxious whisper. “It’s pitch black out there, I can’t see a thing. Can we get out?”

“Well,
you
can, but those holes look awfully little for me.”

“You mean you think you won’t be able to squeeze through?”

“I forgot I was a lot littler the last time I came down here.” He gestures to her. “Come get in front of me. I’ll lift you up. Slide through and see if you can tell where the ground is.”

Thud lifts Bronwyn onto the stone shelf. The window is about half her height in depth. She wriggles and finds her head in the open air. The black earth is only a few inches below her chin. As much by its smell as by its sound she can tell that the water is only a few feet away. She pushes herself backwards and drops back into the basement.

“The ground’s almost level with the window,” she reports.

“Good,” says Thud, as he runs his hand all around the perimeter of the square opening. Suddenly, with a grunt, he hoists himself into the hole. His broad, flat feet waggle in front of Bronwyn’s nose for a moment; then he drops back to the floor, with an appropriate, well, thud.

“It’s gonna be awful tight. Stay here for a minute.”

He vanishes into the dark before Bronwyn can utter a word.

Where does he think I’d go? she wonders. She can follow him by the lance of flickering light that ducks and shoots around among the black columns like a little comet. When it turns back toward her, with the looming black bulk of Thud behind it, she is reminded of the great steam locomotives she had seen in pictures ‘and which she desperately wanted to see in reality). Thud, she sees, has a big ball of black slime mounded in his hand, with thick drools dangling from between his fingers.

“I found a leaky oil pipe,” he says by way of explanation. “Hold the light, please?” She takes the tin cylinder and holds its beam on him as he smears the gelatinous substance over his equatorial circumference.

“All right,” he says, apparently satisfied with the mess he has made of himself. Once again he climbs into the window. He jams himself in tightly, his enormous spherical rear suspended above the floor like a balloon.

“Princess!” She hears his voice float in from one of the adjoining windows. She runs to it and lifts herself onto the slippery shelf, just barely avoiding cracking her head on the stone above. Slithering as quickly as she can, she pops her head out into the open on the other side. There is Thud’s head just a couple of yards to her left. It looks like a jack-o’-lantern sitting in a window. He calls her name again. “Stop doing that!” she hisses. “Someone’s going to hear you!”

“I need your help, please,” he whispers. Bronwyn extinguishes the lantern before crawling out onto the moist, gravelly soil, which is so close to the edge of the window that she is able to emerge on her hands and knees. She stands erect and hurries over to Thud. His little round head is at knee level, his arms and hands protruding on either side. “Take my hands, please,” he asks, “and pull as hard as you can. I’m only stuck a little.”

Bronwyn takes one of his wrists in each of her hands, and Thud in turn grips hers. His are so thick that even her long fingers fail to circle them. She pulls. She pulls again, so hard she can feel her face turning deep red. She releases his arms with a gasp of exhaled breath.

“I moved, I think,” he says “I just got to get my knees in the hole.”

She grips him again, bracing her feet against the stone at either side of the opening. She pulls until her body is as taut as a bowstring and almost parallel with the ground. Suddenly Thud’s body comes free and Bronwyn shoots away from the wall like a quarrel from a crossbow.

She lands squarely on her rear ten feet away with a jolt that clacks her teeth like a nutcracker. She slides backwards on the smooth, small pebbles until she comes to a stop in a few inches of cold water. Her jaw aching, her coccyx feel inches shorter, she is afraid to bite down, certain that at least three inches of her spine must be protruding from her mouth, and the water she is sitting in is making her feel exceedingly uncomfortable.

Thud emerges from the window like a fat pupa wriggling from its egg case. He waddles over to where she sits and helps her up. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answers, waggling her jaw. She thinks she can feel her vertebrae rattling like beads on a string.

“All right. Now we just follow the water.”

He starts off ahead of her and she has to hop and skip a few steps to catch up. Bronwyn decides then and there that she would have to speak to Thud at the first opportunity about this continual habit of giving her orders. He has to be made to understand that she does not
take
orders, and that he is making her angry. Of course, there is no real point in making an issue of the matter until they reached safety. No point, she decides, in offending her rescuer.

They keep to the scanty strip of gravel as often as they can, not wishing to make any noise by splashing water or taking the risk of a fall.

The narrow ravine they are in is absolutely lightless at the bottom. Only the upper stories of the buildings, which loom above them in dizzily vertical walls, are silverily phosphorescent in the light of the hidden moons. Directly overhead is a ribbon of indigo sky, like a blued-steel bandsaw blade . The buildings between which they are passing seem for the most part uninhabited; probably all warehouses or factories; only an occasional ruddy light shines through the midnight walls, like a nova in a starless sky. They pass under several footbridges, which span the stream at various heights. They pass by the open mouths of numerous drains, pouring or dribbling their effluvia into the community sewer that the stream has become.