A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (6 page)

They have just detoured around a fat iron conduit that protrudes from the wall beside them when Thud suddenly stops with a low warning hiss and pushes Bronwyn back behind the big pipe. With an almost inaudible whisper, he says into her ear:
There’s someone up ahead.

Her heart shrinks, curling into a quivering little ball like a frightened hedgehog. She bends down and looks under the pipe where it clears the bank by half a foot. She can see nothing; then, suddenly, she hears the faint, crisp sound of paper being crumpled. She looks in the direction of the sound, avoiding using her direct vision, bringing the more sensitive peripheral part of her retina into play. Under the shadow of a footbridge...yes! The sudden flare of a match and the bearded face of one of Payne’s Guards appears and is gone again. She blinks and can see the negative image of the face. Thud touches her shoulder, and his breath tickles her ear. It smells like cloves. “Wait here. Don’t move, please.”

She reaches to touch him, but he is already gone. She ducks down and peers from under the rough, wet pipe. Thud has melted into the darkness. An agonizingly long moment passes; then she hears a mumbled grunt and the clatter of something metallic dropping onto the stones. Quiet again for a heartbeat and then a sharp crack, like a broomstick broken over a knee. She can guess what that sound represented and feels ill. The agonizingly long moment before seems like nothing compared to the time it takes Thud to return to her. When she hears his soft voice ask, “Princess?” she could have laughed with relief. But she is both too smart and too frightened to do that.

“I am sure surprised to find a Guard down here!” he hisses. “They must want you real bad. It is a good thing they don’t know someone’s with you.”

It certainly is! And certainly nothing like the champion I have in
you
, Mr. Mollockle!

The passage of only a few hundred additional yards brings them around a sharp bend and the harbor opens before them. The stream runs directly into the Slideen, and the parallel walls that had been flanking the two fugitives go right to the water’s edge. The river water laps against the buildings’ foundations around either corner. The gravel bank has disappeared and the stream has widened to fill the space from wall to wall. Thud and Bronwyn are forced to wade to get beyond the limit of the brick and stone canyon. The water only covers their ankles when they first stepped into it, but it quickly deepens. It is above Bronwyn’s knees when they reach the point where the stream actually joins the river, and above her waist when they enter the harbor. The water only comes to the top of Thud’s elephantine thighs.

Turning to the right, they see a broad ledge running along the front of the building; steep stairs rise from it to meet doors at different levels in the façade. Steps also lead down into the water, apparently to allow access to boats of assorted sizes. The anchorage beyond is a confused mass of ships and boats of every imaginable size and shape: hulls, some like massive, square black mountains, others low-slung and rakish; a jungle of masts and spars, festooned with cobwebs of rigging; smokestacks, some squat and barrel like, others like slender pipes; the enormous striding spider-shapes of cranes and derricks. Pale clouds of steam and opaque clouds of smoke drift and shift among the tangle like ponderous and incurious cetaceans cruising through the lightless forests of the deep.

Wharves and piers protrude into the river like the teeth on a comb, adding to the general and disorienting confusion. From the palace on the island upstream shimmer lights that are twinkling and merry, giving Bronwyn’s heart a painful jab as if some secret joke was being emphasized. She has often watched the coming and going of the busy Slideen shipping. She remembers how she had spent hours on sunny afternoons or crimson evenings watching the elegant craft come and go. She would wonder where they had been, what kinds of cargos they were delivering into the warehouses, what might be in those mysteriously anonymous crates, cartons, bales, hogsheads and barrels she saw the cranes lifting from the deep wells of holds, like their feathered namesakes dipping into a pond to spear some surprised frog. True to the national distrust of anything foreign, few monarchs of Tamlaght, and fewer of its citizens, have ever wished to leave its borders, or ever have. In recent history, only the western portion of Londeac,

where it bulges toward the island of Guesclin ‘the great island of which Tamlaght occupies the largest part), separated by the few miles of the Strait, has been visited by a Tamlaghtan ruler. And then only because until just two generations earlier, it had been a territorial possession, since ceded to Londeac, thereby saving xenophobic future monarchs the trauma of ever again having to face the possibility of having to leave the island proper.

In all her life, Bronwyn has never been farther from Blavek than the estuary at the mouth of the Moltus, scarcely one hundred miles to the south. Those visits to what seemed to be the edge of the world haunted her. The great ships that came and went, where did they come from?

Where did they go when they disappeared over the horizon? The poles of the planet are as alluring to her heart as they are to the needle of a compass. She devoured geographies and never went to sleep at night without first having explored the enormous globe that swelled luminously in her room. She would orbit it, trapped within its irresistible gravitation like a helpless satellite. It had been created by a master cartographer and illuminated lovingly by four monks, one of whom died before his masterpiece was complete, but much of the lovingly applied gilt and colored paint had been eroded by her traveling fingers.

She had traced the routes of the great adventurers, explorers, traders and caravans. With her fingertips, she had tried to imagine what the painted deserts might really feel like, what the green tempera patches of jungle might sound like at night, what the people who lived on the banks of the mighty rivers, meandering the globe like the blue veins on a great, milky breast, looked like, how strange their tongues might sound. She tried to conjure the smells and tastes and textures represented by the cartographer’s symbols. But her imagination was never as sufficient as it was provocative.

All the ships that came and went on the Slideen, and the Moltus beyond, she thought were beautiful. She loved the functional-looking freighters: they looked boxy and gruff, with no nonsense about them, like the mustachioed, red-cheeked sergeants in the Royal Army. Some carried three or four masts but more and more were converting to steam...and she chafed for the hundredth time at having never in her life actually seen a real steam engine, those wonderful symbols of the Conqueror Engineer, with her own eyes. A stumpy funnel protruded behind their wheelhouses, pouring out boiling clouds of black coal smoke that made the sun look rusty brown when it shone through them. Yet they kept their masts even though they might be as rudimentary and functionless as an ostrich’s wings. Outsiders, other than merchants, seldom came to Blavek, but on rare occasions an elegant yacht would pull into the harbor. Its hull would be as white as an iceberg, its long, low superstructure glinting with polished wood and brass. Its masts would be raked back at a slight angle, its funnels, too, if it had them, giving it an impression of speed even as it sat motionless in the midst of the river’s more mundane traffic, like a greyhound in a dog pound.

Pilot-boats and steam-launches would crawl across the grey water, leaving behind them pale wakes, like fat snails sliding over a sheet of glass. She remembered how at night she would watch the twinkling yellow lights from portholes and the bright beacons of red and green running lights that looked like stars against the dark water, shifting and changing as though Musrum were stirring the very constellations with His great forefinger.

Bronwyn looked upstream and could see the lights of the palace and the hazy, bright glow of the lamps that illuminated the boulevard that spanned the river. She hadn’t realized that the harbor would lose so much of its romance when seen close at hand at night. She feels as though she is standing at the brink of a deep and primeval forest.

“We need to find a really small boat,” whispers Thud. Which they do very soon; a shell that looks scarcely large enough for Thud by himself. It is tied to the end of the platform by a long painter, which they use to maneuver the boat to the foot of one of the sets of steps. Moments later they find themselves adrift.

“When I was a kid,” whispers Thud, leaning toward Bronwyn and rocking the little boat distressingly. Bronwyn had never been a great one for swimming, let alone in the chilly, black waters of the Slideen on a starless night, and as Thud’s movement shifts the center of gravity toward her; cold water slops distressingly over the gunwale. “When I was a kid,” he continues, “I made myself a raft from some barrels and stuff. I couldn’t steer it with paddles for nothing; it would only spin in circles. But if I just let ‘er alone, the current took me right across the river, right to Catstongue. Anything drifting in the river ends up in a big eddy there. If we just let ourselves go, we’ll be all right.”

“I can’t believe this is your big plan,” Bronwyn answers testily, forgetting that it seemed fine to her only a few hours earlier. “And I wish you’d sit still!” At that moment, a large steam-pilot passes them in the channel, its paddles thrashing the water like a vast eggbeater. The little boat spins in the wake as though it were caught in a whirlpool. Bronwyn grips the sides until her fingers ache, and she squeezes her eyes shut, flinching at every splash of icy water that hit her. The shell is sucked into the middle of the river. The moving lights of ships are all around them, ghostly hulks, hissing steam or creaking with cables; their engines and chains clanking. Voices come over the water from all directions. Bronwyn feels like a rabbit in a herd of cattle.

“I don’t remember it being this busy,” apologizes Thud.

“You are just a dumb kid thirty years ago, that’s why.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I don’t know why we couldn’t at least have taken some oars, just in case.”

“I guess we could’ve.”

“Why aren’t we moving anymore?”

The city, to their left as they faced downstream, should have been moving to the left as the current carried them. Nor was it actually motionless, as Bronwyn had thought at first; it was moving in the
wrong
direction.

“The river’s going
backwards
!” Thud whispers in surprise.

“That’s impossible,” hisses the princess.

“Well, look, then,” answers Thud, and when she looks, sure enough, they are unquestionably moving upstream.

This isn’t possible! The river comes from the mountains, it is headed to the sea; how can it be going the wrong way? The answer comes to her immediately, and she feels as stupid as she ever cared to, which generally is not at all, : the
tide
! Blavek is at the fall line of the river, at the northernmost limit of the tidewater country. The city is virtually at sea level and when the tide came up the estuary, it backed up the water of the river as far as Blavek.

Damn! How could she have known? She is no sailor. She desperately wants to blame Thud, it has to be
someone’s
fault, so why not his? This was entirely his idea, after all; the man is clearly feeble-minded; why had she ever gone along with him? It is utterly stupid on the face of it. Now look at what is happening: she is drifting directly toward Palace Island. Merciful Musrum, it is the very place from which she has been trying to escape! For all she knew, Payne and Ferenc are in one of the towers, gloating as they watch her inexorably drift toward them. She is certain they would be vastly amused, damn them.

Soon enough, the vertical stone embankment of Palace Island looms above them. It is a peculiar sensation, looking at a place as though it was a prison that for eighteen years had been a home, more or less. She can see the towers and turrets of the palace proper and the blocks of government buildings that surround it. They glow like hot bricks in the light of the boulevard’s gas lamps. She can see figures moving regularly along the parapet’s edge, not fifty feet over their heads: Guards on patrol. The little boat rounds the northeast corner of the island. Ahead of them yawns four vast, black mouths, the openings to the tunnels that allow the Slideen to pass beneath the causeway. Above the tunnel mouths are the bright lights lining the roadway, and the dimmer, golden lights in the windows of the official mansions, offices and palaces built over the river. She can see the busy shadows of people and vehicles. When will someone finally see

them and raise the alarm? She feel as obvious as a clown in church. They are now in a narrow channel, only a hundred yards wide; the cliff-like stone wall supporting Palace Island is now on their left, and the embankments of Blavek are on their right. They are almost within one of the cavernous tunnels; Bronwyn can see the parapet of the causeway only by craning her neck and looking straight up. When she does, she sees, to her horror, the pale blob of a face looking back down at her. It is topped by the distinctive plumed shako of one of Payne’s Guards. Just before the face is cut off by the edge of the tunnel as they pass within it, she hears a rasping sound and something plops wetly onto the floor of the boat alongside her foot. Then the darkness of the tunnel swallows them.

He spat at me!
Bronwyn realizes with disgust. In reality, the man had merely used some drifting débris for target practice.
The Guards are animals
,
as I’ve always thought
;
absolutely uncouth
.

The tunnel is a half-cylinder arching over the refugees, the roof perhaps twenty feet above. Chalky chandeliers of lime and calcium hang from it, dissolved and redeposited by the constantly dripping water that drizzles from fissures, cracks and seams in the vault, a drizzle that has them drenched within minutes. It takes perhaps ten of those minutes for the boat to pass from one end of the tunnel to the other, though it seems hours to Bronwyn. Finally, they emerge from the western mouth with Palace Island now behind them. The boat stops drifting, rotating idly in a slow eddy. They are only a few yards from a weedy bank on the City side of the river. Thud climbed out of the boat, sinking nearly to his waist, and pulled it and Bronwyn to the shore. Bronwyn can have cried with fury and frustration. After all she has been through, she is back exactly from where she has started, her deadly enemies not five hundred yards away.