A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (12 page)

CHAPTER SIX

WANDERINGS

Bronwyn and Professor Wittenoom have been meandering more or less northward for nearly a week and the princess would have been disconsolate had she known how little distance, in a straight line from Hartal-around-the-Bend, they have actually covered. The road loops and backtracks as haphazardly as the goatpath it had once been, wandering as aimlessly as the spirit of the dejected and pointless countryside. She had no idea that such miserable territory existed in Tamlaght; but then, she really has little firsthand knowledge about the country her family has been ruling for generations. She has, in fact, probably seen more of Londeac in the last eighteen months than she had of Tamlaght in the last eighteen years.

The countryside is perpetually damp. The thin, starved-looking trees are covered with thick mats of moss or rubbery yellow fungus. Fallen trunks quickly decomposed to grey, pulpy mounds. The road they have been following is little more than a track or footpath, more often a U-shaped ditch as deep as it is wide. It is always slippery with yellow mud at best, but at its worst the mud comes above their ankles, sucking at them like fat, wet lips. Summer is well under way and the moistness of the landscape translates into a smothering humidity. The oversaturated atmosphere refuses to accept any more water and perspiration is left to pour, unevaporated, down their bodies, dripping in salty rivulets onto the soggy road, where it does no good whatsoever.

Their clothing clings to their bodies, glued there by a sticky combination of sweat and talc-like dust. The air is a murky haze, as though the princess and the professor are a pair of guppies in an aquarium far overdue for cleaning.

The professor is nowhere near as entertaining a traveling companion as the baron had been. He knows no stories or anecdotes at all, and seems only willing to speak when he thinks he can impart interesting information. He never fails to point out the names of plants and mineral formations as they pass them, though the novelty of this soon wears thin for Bronwyn since the professor knows little else about plants or minerals than their scientific names, which means little to her. Her attempts to turn these pedagogical proclamations into conversational seeds are, well, fruitless. Wittenoom only shrugs and drift off into whatever finer world he normally occupies, where his consciousness remains until recalled by taxonomic necessity.

The region is far more densely populated than Bronwyn would have suspected, though it is certainly far from crowded. No more than five or ten miles is passed without seeing at least one other human being: generally regarding the strangers with a shabby, suspicious, dull face. Yet, Bronwyn realizes, the only interest they can be arousing must be caused by the fact that they are traveling at all. They are in a place, she comprehends, where a human being might never stray more than half a mile from the place where he or she had been born. It is a depressing corollary realization that were they not on the road, no one would be paying them any attention at all, and the sad reason for this is that they look no better than the wretched natives. Their clothes are now filthy rags of an indeterminate color and shape; their attempts to wash them in streams have met with only middling success since the cloth only served to filter from the water the grey sediments that have washed down from the barren fields.

Bronwyn is inordinately thankful that she had found a pair of shoes before they had gone very far from Hartal: a pair of crusty and semipetrified work shoes someone had carelessly left near a toolshed. Her feet are too small for them and rattle inside like dry beans (a problem she only partially solved by tearing cloth from the tail of her shirt and wrapping it around her feet), and the soles of the shoes are as thin as paper, but she could not have gone a mile without them. The pain from the unaccustomed posture and gait has reached her hips . . . her feet have long since gone numb.

They never met another person on the road; they neither overtook, nor are overtaken. Only the grey people who glance for a moment from gravelly, infertile gardens or the doorways of threadbare huts, with gaps between their weathered planks wide enough to pass a hand through, and naked children of all ages stopping their desultory play long enough to notice the pair of travelers, their faces gaunt and black with grime, their incurious eyes lusterless.

There are no villages as such, at most an occasional cluster of ragged, slump-shouldered huts. Bronwyn has the image of some colossal and unhygienic beast that slouches through the forest eating trees and peat and mud and occasionally shitting a shack, hovel or shanty, or, if feeling diarrhetic, an entire village.

In order to eat, she and the professor had at first tried raiding the gaunt and stony gardens, but the strange and silent people frightened Bronwyn and she was afraid of being seen and caught. She had hoped that the professor, who is so knowledgeable about botany, might recognize edible wild flora. But she discovers that plants as plants mean nothing to Wittenoom; once they are catalogued he has exhausted both his interest and his knowledge. He might recognize a plant as being of the genus
Fragaria
, but that the fruit it bore is popularly known as the strawberry is unknown to him. likewise, he might point to a plant and say, “There’s an
Allium
,” but it would mean nothing to Bronwyn who has never before seen a wild onion.

Bronwyn finds that due to her earlier experiences she has more practical knowledge of dining
al fresco,
as it were, than the erudite scientist, and they are able to find a few varieties of familiar berries and nuts whose discovery provide the princess with much satisfaction but are disappointing in quantity.

They even try begging but with very little success. Working against them are the grinding poverty of the people and their intense distrust of strangers. It is difficult to ask something from people who have nothing themselves. From the black looks they almost invariably received, it is apparent that the natives themselves agreed that this is an inappropriate imposition.

The privation is much harder, the princess realizes, finally, on the elderly scientist than on her. Normally gaunt to the point of emaciation, Wittenoom now looks dangerously cadaverous. His skin has grown sallow and clings loosely to his bones, like damp tissue paper. His eyes no longer sparkle behind his glasses; they merely stare unfocussed at a point about fifteen feet ahead, with neither his characteristic interest nor humor. He drags his feet mechanically, mathematically pacing off the endless muddy ditch like a pair of steel dividers.

Bronwyn has just begun to grow worried about the man when they came to yet one more village.

It is really more a cluster of shabby hovels clinging to the vast, decaying bulk of a church and monastery like ticks attaching themselves to a buffalo. The monastery is only an ancient stone cube, erected without art or particular attention to rectilinearity though it is inspired compared to the attached church, which maintains the traditional, dull Musrumic style with fastidious if unimaginative perfection. Both buildings are being allowed to be reclaimed by Nature who, no doubt, has far better use for the materials. The splayed foundations are sinking into the murky, peaty soil, throwing the structures far out of plumb; the walls are zigzagged with cracks, and all of the windows are unglazed trapezoids.

The monastery and church are occupied and operated by a few dozen aging monks, who welcom the strangers with a kind of senile, distracted hospitality. It has been so long since they’d seen anyone from outside the village that protocol is something that has to be more or less created
ad lib
from cobwebby and long-unused memories, -like exploring attics full of dusty, unopened trunks, or picture albums so long unopened that they are now full of only vaguely familiar strangers. Still, the old men are kind and give generously of what little they have. The princess and the professor are fed a watery vegetable soup, a smoky-flavored tea, some stale bread that would have completed its petrifaction within the hour and a cup of slightly lumpy sour milk. There are a few small, hard, bitter apples and an antique chunk of cheese sharp enough to have whittled with. Bronwyn thinks that she has never eaten finer food, a certain example of how hungry she is.

The hall to which they have been taken is a dark and cool relief from the heat and humidity outside. The room smells earthy and ancient, like a cave.

The monks have said scarcely a word since their arrival, and not a syllable since the strangers began eating, and the princess begins to fear that they are members of some order that proscribed speech. She has not realized how much she misses real conversation, to say nothing of how badly she needs information.

Her fears are without foundation, she happily discovers, when a monk she has not seen before approaches her after the meal. He is dressed, as are the others, in a heavy, coarse, black-hooded cassock that leaves only his face visible: a kindly but almost impossibly wrinkled visage that looks insubstantially soft and translucent; she unkindly but accurately compares it to a rotting pear. Although his body is hidden from view by his robe, there is ample evidence of its presence, which, judging by the domed shape of the cassock, which resembles a tent pitched in the middle of the stone-flagged floor, is corpulent at best and most likely intensely and impeccably obese.

“Welcome,” he says to his guests, once he has allowed them to finish eating, “to the Abbey of Saint Woncible. “I am Father Flatnoy, the abbot, and . . .” He looks at his guests curiously, a raised eyebrow inviting them to introduce themselves.

“My name is, um, Bronwyn,” the princess replies, not even considering using her previously despised
nom de crime
, “and this is my Uncle Whemner.” (Which is, in fact, Professor Wittenoom’s real first name.)

“It’s not very often we get visitors here . . .” begins the abbot, who fortunately shows no sign of recognizing the princess from her name (and who can have reasonably expected him to?).

“Not in thirty-seven years!” corrects a croaking voice from somewhere in the room.

“Yes. As I said . . .”

“Not since the sulfur water market dried up,” continues the interruptor. “Hee! hee! I believe that is a joke!”

“I’m reminded of the parable,” says another voice (it is impossible to tell which of the hooded shapes is speaking), “recorded in
Musrum,
chapter one hundred and twelve, verse sixty-seven. ‘A blind did hide five hundred crowns in a corner of their garden; but a neighbor, which is perceive it, did dig up and took its. The blind not finding more her money, is suspect that might be the robed, but one work for take again it? He is going find the neighbor, and told him that he came to get him a council; than he is a thousand crown with the half is hided into a sure part and I don’t know if want, if to put the remains to the same part. The neighbor is council him so and is hasten to carry back that sum, in the hope soon to draw out a thousand. But the blind having finded the money, is seized it, having called her neighbor, he told him: Gossip, the blind saw clearer than this that may have two eyes. ‘ Amen.”

“Amen,” choruses the room.

“What,” asks the first voice testily, “has that to do with anything?”

“What?”

“I have more than once,” grumbles the abbot, “wished that our order have taken a vow of silence. Will you follow me to the gardens? We can talk peacefully there.”

Bronwyn and the professor allow themselves to be led from the hall, the abbot’s enormous bulk swinging ponderously from side to side like a tugboat in a heavy swell. Bronwyn decides that the garden they find themselves in exists almost exclusively in the abbot’s imagination. A rectangle enclosed on two sides by the colonnaded monastery and church and on the remaining two sides by a high stone wall, it contains little more than gravel and a few bravely struggling weeds. With a wheeze, the huge man settles himself onto a specially reinforced rustic bench. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “I’m not half the man I used to be,” he says, which conjures an image in Bronwyn’s imagination of an almost cosmically vast younger abbot. “This summer weather is a terrible burden.”

“I for one,” commiserates the princess, “would hate to have to wear a heavy woolen robe on a day like this.”

“I remember all too well the halcyon days of my youth; an afternoon like this would invariably find me and my companions splashing in some refreshing pool in a nearby stream or river. ‘The pains come at horse and turn one’s self at foot,’ as Musrum wisely put it. Ah, well. It’s not often, as I mentioned a moment ago that we get strangers passing through here . . .” He glances at the princess curiously, waiting for her to respond to his unexpressed question.

Bronwyn had not thought that she would need to explain to anyone the reasons for her presence on the road, and has not prepared a plausible story. She is not a talented liar.

“We are, ah, on our way to the north coast, to, ah, meet my father.”

“Your father is a sailor, I gather?”

“Why, ah, yes . . . how did you know?”

“Merely hazarding a guess, but your own costume suggested the connection. Never mind me, I’m becoming too inquisitive . . .”

Yes, you are
,
agrees Bronwyn.

“ . . . We turn away no one here. As Musrum Himself says, ‘So many go to the jar to spring, than at last rest there.’ Where you’re from or where you’re going is of no concern to us. Forgive my curiosity: it’s so seldom that we have visitors here, and even more seldom that they are of any education or breeding.”

“Please don’t concern yourself, there is no offense. Ask us anything you wish, I’ll be glad to answer any questions you may have.”
Though the answers may be entirely fictitious.

“You are most kind, and very understanding. ‘All trees have very deal bear,’
Musrum,
twelve: one hundred and eleven. I thank you. Tell me, is there any chance that you’ve been outside recently?”

“Outside?”

“Forgive me. I mean, have you been outside this region? Have you been in any towns or villages lately where there’s been any news of the outside world? I’ve gotten no direct news from the Mother Church for months, and what little that’s trickled down to us has been most distressingly disturbing. ‘The necessity don’t know the low,’ as Musrum so clearly put it.”