A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (9 page)

Once within hailing distance, the same figure that had been waving shouts, “Hello! Hello there!”

“Hello!” replies the princess. “Can you help us?”

“We’ll come alongside!”

The fishing sloop deftly obeys its master’s promise and soon the three waifs find themselves being hoisted aboard the small craft by strong arms. There are heavy blankets waiting for them and Bronwyn and her friends gratefully enwrap themselves.

“Where you from?” asks the master of the fishing boat, a squat, dour, powerfully built man. Before the princess can reply, Basseliniden answers the question. “We lost our boat to pirates.”

“
Pirates
?” replies the master, his eyebrows retreating the short distance into his hairline, like a pair of very tiny animals fleeing into a dense undergrowth. “Pirates?”

“We lost our pleasure boat, the, ah,
Perky Princess.
Just a small yacht, nothing fancy, but they took it from us just the same. Cast us adrift, they did. Been drifting for days. Don’t know what we would’ve done if you haven’t come along. Bless you, sir, bless you.”

“What pirates?” says the master, reluctant to relinquish the main mystery, but Basseliniden continues before the captain can even finish the question.

“We surely would’ve perished, sir. To whom do we have the pleasure of owing our lives?”

“What?”

“My name is, um, John Hatteras, and this is my niece, Hazel . . .”

“Haz . . . !” began the princess, then wisely shuts up.
Hazel, eh?,
she thinks grimly.
Let’s see if that gets
you
the Order of St. Wladimir when I get back home.

“ . . . and her grandfather, Mr. um, Bipkus.”

“Oh, ah,” says the master, getting the idea. “This here is the
Wansa D. Prittly.
Wansa D., she’s my wife, and I named my boat after her, you see.”

“I’m sure she must’ve appreciated it.”

“Well, no.”

“And you must be Captain Prittly, I take it?”

“Yes sir, that I be! You’ve heard of me, then?”

“Captain Prittly, sir,” interjects Bronwyn, “can you take us in to Hartal-around-the-Bend?”

“You mean
now
? Back in?”

“Yes. You see, it’s very important that we get ashore as soon as possible.”

“Why? Haven’t you been drifting around for days? Why such a hurry now?”

“That’s just the reason. There must . . . are a lot of people who must be wondering what’s happened to us . . .”

“Her dear mother must be absolutely prostrate with grief and worry.”

“Her mother?” The captain glances at the princess, who is trying her best to look young, innocent and helpless; an effort that would have been hopelessly unsuccessful (since Bronwyn is neither a good actress nor particularly innocent or helpless; she
is
young, though) with anyone much more perceptive than Captain Prittly. However, not being terribly critical, he looks upon her amateur histrionics with much more seriousness than she really has any right to expect. “Her mother, you say?”

“Worried to death.”

“Well, that’s different, as you say. Crew won’t like it though. Lose a whole day’s fishing. Wansa’ll probably kill me.”

“Why, Wansa’ll be proud of you, I’m sure . . . and there
will
be a reward . . .”

“Reward?”

“Enough to more than make up for missing a day’s fishing, at least. The duchess, Hazel’s mother, will be so glad to see her returned to the family estate . . .”

“Duchess, eh? . . . Lemme explain things to my crew.”

“Please.”

Bronwyn watches the captain rejoin his crew, who have been watching the episode with strained comprehension. While those explanations are taking place, she demands some of her own from Basseliniden.

“I didn’t think it would be wise to let anyone know exactly who we are.”

“I agree. But
Hazel
?”

“Shh! He’s coming back.”

“My men agree,” says the captain. “So’s we can head back to the village now. We’re not so far out and mayhaps we can still get some hours fishin’ today. And here’s some dry clothes for the young lady.”

“Fine!” says Basseliniden. “Fine. My niece’s mother, that is, my sister, will be delighted to learn that her daughter is safe and sound.”

“Is there a telegraph in town?” asks the princess.

“Tell-a-what?” replies Captain Prittly, as he gives his crew their orders for putting about.

“Never mind. May I speak to you a moment,
Uncle?”

Taking the captain aside, as far as practicably possible from Prittly and his crew, she says, while trying her best not to look too suspiciously conspiratorial, “There won’t be any news of the rest of the fleet, but then again there might not be any word out about us, either. I’m certain that the sailing of my ships is no secret from Payne, so he must also know of their fate. I know he won’t take my disappearance as any guarantee that I’m dead. If he’s learned that the ship I is on has been lost, he’ll alert every coastal town he can to be on the watch for me. He won’t be satisfied until he sees my body.”

“Our only advantage is that he cann’t possibly know we’ve traversed the Strait and are now on the southeast coast.”

”True, but it also puts us five or six hundred miles from the nearest point where the remnants of my army may have landed. I’ve never been in this part of the country before, but I do know that it’s one of the most backward, primitive and difficult parts of all Tamlaght.”

The princess, as always, is accurate in her geographic knowledge. The southeast region of Tamlaght, a great quarter circle that bulged into the southern seas, is a wild and seldom-visited region. It is a moderately level, low country, surrounded by undulating ridges and hills that converted the area into a vast, shallow bowl. As a result the land is swampy at worst and marshy at best; springs are abundant and streams by the hundreds randomly laced the flat landscape. In the central part are numerous hot springs and other hydrothermal features, all lavishly fed by the endless supply of water that percolated through the porous, gravelly, alkaline soil. That same soil is of such poor quality that the inhabitants are only able to eke out a meager existence by harvesting peat, hunting the wan, unhealthy animals for their worthless pelts, creating small, wicker handicrafts which, since no one wanted them, accumulated in vast, prickly piles outside every hamlet, and fishing along the coast, where they have their only real contact with the outside world, since overland connections are difficult if not impossible, where they are not actually nonexistent. There are no canneries, such as can be found in other fishing towns, such as Glibner, nor any other industry, but there is a constant if not lucrative industry based on dried fish.

There are few villages, and no other towns worthy of the name other than Hartal-around-the-Bend. There are few churches, no markets, no schools, no banks, no newspapers (no one can have read them anyway), no authority, no curiosity, no industry; all that the natives can be says to possess in any real quantity is a kind of physical and mental malaise, a spiritual anemia as lifeless and wan as the grey soil beneath their feet.

In order to reach the shores of Guesclin Bay, or even the nearest intervening town where she might learn some news, the princess would have to cross a nearly pathless and literally uncharted wilderness.

The
Wansa D.
coasts into the small, nearly circular harbor of Hartal-around-the-Bend. The town, such at it is, had been mostly hidden by the encircling arms of the bay. It is revealed to be a haphazard cluster of unpainted buildings that tumbles down a hillside overlooking the wharves, as though they are a collection of used containers spilling into a landfill.

As the captain warps the
Wansa D.
into her slip, the princess asks him if there might be any place in town where she and her companions can get something to eat. She is told that there is a café of sorts and is provided with the appropriate directions. As she and the professor step from the gangplank to the dock, Basseliniden gives the captain an elaborately worded and elegantly signed promissory note, written on a sheet from the professor’s notebook. He takes some perverse pleasure in making Payne Roelt responsible for the note’s redemption, which is for an enormously extravagant sum (far more, in fact, than he told Prittly it was for; although all numbers look pretty much alike to the uneducated seaman, he still wouldn’t have believed what all the zeros were for).

It is something of a cruel joke, really, to play upon the captain for rescuing them, even if Basseliniden had done it a little reluctantly. Prittly takes the note home to Wanda where, after admiring it for several hours, they wait until dark and bury it in a coffee can under a withered fir tree at the bottom of their garden. Prittly later tells his crew that the castaways had provided a ten-percent bonus on their regular day’s wages and paid them out of his own savings. He and Wanda spend the remainder of their lives planning what they are going to do with the reward money, though they ultimately, for one reason or another, never leave Hartal-around-the-Bend and die without ever redeeming the precious note.

Basseliniden catches up with the princess and the professor and together they set out in search of the café.

The streets of Hartal are little more than meandering drains and are in reality merely spaces between the tawdry buildings rather than real streets. That is, they really
are
drains. Like the two men, the princess is barefoot. She walks slowly, being warily circumspect about each footfall. In many places she sinks to her ankles in the greenish-grey mud, if in fact it
is
mud. Bronwyn had expected to feel conspicuous because of her bedraggled state, but she quickly discovered that she is dressed no worse than the few inhabitants they pass, who follow the strangers with incurious, unintelligent gazes.

“What a miserable place,” observes the princess.

“Indeed,” agrees the professor, who has not spoken for some time. “I fear that there won’t be much help for us here.”

The café turns out to be a shopfront, unmarked except for a small pencilled notice stuck to the window. The note read
Smelly Nell’s.
They found the place only after some confused casting about, locating it partly from Prittly’s directions, and a process of elimination, combined with the scent of overused cooking oil that pours from the open doorway. They climb the two or three rickety steps and enter the nearly lightless room. Inside there are only four small plain wood tables. The floor is as bare as the walls. Had the princess not been quite so starved she would have noticed how rank is the stench of ages-old hot fish oil. The atmosphere of the café is so saturated with piscine fats that it is probably as combustible as a balloon full of hydrogen. There is no one else in the small room, but a phlegmy hacking from somewhere in the rear gave too-clear evidence of habitation.

“Hello?” inquires the princess.

What
? comes back an irritated squawk.

“Is there anything to eat here?” Bronwyn calls into the anonymous gloom. “We’re hungry.”

Her only answer is another round of tubercular hacking. There is the thick sound of a throat being cleared and the wet
thwack
of something large and mucoid impacting wood. “Musrum be damned,” comes the voice again, this time accompanied by a figure appearing from a curtain-shrouded doorway. “D’you think I got nothin’ else to do?”

“Captain Prittly told us we can get something to eat here,” says Basseliniden.

“Prittly’s an asshole.” The figure looks the trio up and down carefully. “Who th’ hell’re
you
?”

“We’re strangers here,” says Wittenoom.

“We were shipwrecked,” continues Bronwyn, “and Captain Prittly rescued us.”

“So what? Does that answer my question? No, it hardly does, does it? D’you think just because that fat prick sends you here that I’m under any obligation t’ feed you?”

“This is a café, isn’t it?” asks the princess.

“Who says it is?”

“Captain Prittly did.”

“So?”

“Look,” growls the princess, who, no doubt because of her weakened condition, has shown a restraint remarkably atypical for her, “if you have no intention of providing us with any food, we’ll go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Where? I don’t know . . .”

“There ain’t nowhere else in Hartal.”

“We’ll find something. Come on Professor, Captain . . .”

“Hold on. I ain’t never says I wouldn’t feed you, did I?”

“Well, if you plan on it, why don’t you just get on with it instead of going through all of this song and dance?”

“A little touchy, ain’t you?”

“What would you expect? We’ve been shipwrecked, I told you; we haven’t eaten in days!”

“So what? You think that’s so rough? You don’t live in Hartal-around-the-Bend, do you?”

“You’re right, we’d be better off on the raft,” sneers Bronwyn.

Somehow this seems to satisfy the proprietor. He steps forward into what little light filters through the dingy curtains wiping his hands on a black, waxy-looking cloth. Bronwyn immediately preferred that he had stayed where he was; she is too hungry to afford having any of her appetite lost and, as powerful as her hunger is, it has little chance against the appearance of the cafe’s owner. He is grossly fat with that sort of shapeless, half-liquid obesity that looks more like partially set gelatine or tapioca. The mere act of breathing sets undulating ripples echoing around his mass, like the overlapping waves of an earthquake. His clothing is grey with multiple strata of stains and crusts that could have easily and appropriately been charted and dated by a geologist. So closely does the color and texture of his clothing resemble what of his skin is visible that it is difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins, if it even matters. Before he speaks again, the proprietor scratches around in the clotted masses of oily hair that lay plastered thickly to his scalp, eventually producing a tiny grey wriggling thing. He regards it with little interest, finally crushing it between his fingernails, under which are packed the blackened remains of hundreds of its fellows.