A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist (20 page)

“No, not exactly. The former, certainly, but I is rather hoping that you’d soon arrive at a point where you’d beg me to take you.”

“And something as pathetic as that excites you?”

“It’s not as easy a thrill to come by as you might think. Women like you are altogether too rare, believe me.”

“Life must be a real burden for you sometimes.”

“Ennui is the only real hell there is,” he sighs as he places his empty sherry glass on the sideboard and rubs his palms together. They make a dry sound, like two sheets of paper. “I’ve been looking forward to this day for weeks.”

“Then how much more awful your disappointment will be.”

“It begins?”

“It does,” Bronwyn replies, vaulting over the back of her chair. Two long steps and she snatches one of the slim blades from the wall. “Except for one thing,” she adds.

“Whatever could that be?” asks Bugarach, still advancing as casually as though he really was entertaining a guest, though his face is pale and glistening.

“I think that I want
you
!”

“What?”

“I said that I think that I want you!”

“No, no. No. You can’t do
that
,” he chides, stopping in the middle of the salon.

“Come on, Lord Bugarach,” she says, advancing a step or two, twirling the end of the sword in small circles, “be a sport!”

“This is no joke, Bronwyn! Put that down!”

“No.”

“You’ll regret this, Bronwyn . . .”

“Stop calling me that. I’ve told you before, it’s ‘your Highness’ to you.”

“
Your Highness
,” he sneers. “What I’d planned for you is merciful compared to what I must do now.”

“And what terribly melodramatic thing might that be?” she enquires calmly, advancing another two or three steps. Bugarach holds his ground until the fourth.

“You’re not going to deliver damaged goods to your friend the Badaud, are you?” she asks.

“Put that down; you’re going to hurt someone.”

“Probably. I wonder who? Not me, I’m on the blunt end.”

She makes a sudden lunge at Bugarach, not a serious thrust, she is still too far away, but just enough to see what will happen. The man leaps backward with a squeal and falls over a hassock. He scrambles to his feet and places a chair between himself and the still-advancing girl.

“All right, Bronwyn,
Princess
Bronwyn, your Highness, you may go back to your cabin,” he says, his voice shaking. “I’ll leave you alone until we get to Spondula. All right? Agreed?”

“No. Come on, Bugarach, I’d really like to see what you can do.”

“You’re joking.”

She makes another sudden leap, and two or three slashes with her blade send horsehair flying from the lacerated chair only a fraction of an inch from the man’s fingertips. Bugarach squeals again, snatching his hands back. Bronwyn carefully keeps between the sniveling man and the outside door. She herds him around the room as though he is a sheep. She begins to enjoy this exercise and refines her control, seeing how easily and accurately she can dictate his movements.

Bugarach is perspiring so freely it drips from his nose and his black hair is plastered to his forehead.

“You
are
excited,” she says. “I
like
that. But you look overheated. Why don’t you take your jacket off?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“
Take the jacket off, please
.” It flies across the room. He has removed it without even waiting to unbutton it.

“That’s better now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Now I think the shirt should go.”

“No!”

Bronwyn has carelessly allowed Bugarach to place himself behind a light chair and as he says the above word, he suddenly throws it at her, bolting for the door at the same time. The chair strikes her painfully across the shins but she is after him almost instantly. She lashes out with her sword and its tip slices across the retreating buttocks like a whip. He screams in a high-pitched wail, stumbles and falls.

“Help!” he shrieks, abandoning all pretense of suavity. “Help!”

He scrambles crab-like on the carpet, which has left an enormous red abrasion on one cheek from his collision with it, as Bronwyn advances above him.

“You must pay your crew well; they’re very obedient.”

“Help!” he whimpers.

“Come on! Come on!” she urges, whacking his legs with the flat of her sword. “Let’s get that shirt off!”

“Please, no.”

The sword point whicks past his face so closely he can feel it brush his eyebrows. He begins tearing at the shirt’s fine linen. Buttons bounce around the princess’s feet. Bugarach balls the fabric in his hands, then suddenly throws it into Bronwyn’s face. She instinctively ducks and Bugarach springs from the floor. He crashes into her stomach and, the wind knocked from her, she falls back, nearly stumbling to the floor. Bugarach, meantime, continues on past her, again toward the door. She lunges, slashes and misses. Bugarach, forgetting that the doors swung outwards, is pulling on them frantically when Bronwyn’s charge plummets her into his back. Both go tumbling onto the deck beyond.

Bronwyn is cushioned by Bugarach while Bugarach’s face crunches onto the polished teak. She somersaults on over him, coming to a rest nearly upside down against the coaming. Bugarach is up almost instantly, leaving behind a bloody imprint of his face and runs toward the bow. Bronwyn is up almost as quickly and follows.

Bugarach, again shrieking for help as loudly as he can, can not keep his eyes off his pursuer with the necessary result that he falls over a chain on the deck. By the time he has skidded to a halt, Bronwyn is once again over him.

“You’re doing fine so far,” she pants, “but now you’ve made a mess of those nice white trousers. I think that you’d better get them off, too.”

“Please, Princess, I apologize! I’ll do whatever you want!”

“Good! That’s just what I wanted to here. Take your pants off!”

“I
can’t
!”

“Certainly you can,” she says, emphasizing her words with slashes from her sword, each stroke making a neat incision in the front of Bugarach’s trousers. “You got
into
them, didn’t you? I’m getting a little tired now; I don’t know how long I can remain this level of accuracy.”

“All right! All right!” he sobs. “I’ll do it! You’re a monster!”

“If you say so. Wouldn’t that be easier if you took your shoes off first?”

Bronwyn laughs at the calisthenic convolutions the harried man achieves in the course of the simple act of removing his pants. This only makes Bugarach all the more angry and flustered. He finally stands there clad only in his silken underdrawers. He seems to be trying to fold into himself, like a paper puzzle.

“Baby blue!” she cries. “Isn’t that pretty? Who would have thought?”

“You’ve really gone too far, Princess. This is enough. What exactly do you want from me?”

“No more than you wanted from me, dear Bugarach.”

“But this is too much. I didn’t actually
do
anything!”

“No?” She touches his bare stomach with the tip of her sword. The muscles tried to retreat from the sharp point. She raises it slowly, watching with fascination the little dimple of cringing tissue follow the tip. The man is as white as lard everywhere except his face, which is turning blue from hyperventilation.

“This is it, Bugarach. You know what I want. You are anxious enough half an hour ago to give it to me. Why won’t you let me take it now?”

“You’re being obscene! This is unspeakable! What are you? What’s happened to you?”

“You and your friends ought to know that well enough. This is no joke, Bugarach,” she says with a sudden, chilling seriousness. “Take those off or I’ll cut them off!”.

“Oh, holy Musrum! I
can’t
!” he whimpers, tears flooding his cheeks.

“If you won’t, I will,” she says, sliding the blade under the drawstring.

Without warning there is a sudden, high-pitched whistling shriek over their heads and almost simultaneously with the distant sharp boom of a cannon is an exploding geyser of water beyond the bow. In her surprise, Bronwyn flings the point of her sword up, cutting the drawstring of Bugarach’s underdrawers. He leaps out of them as slickly as a watermelon seed and runs up a nearby ladder touching only every third rung. After her initial surprise, Bronwyn sets off in pursuit of the now naked man.

She gains the roof of the deckhouse in time to see Bugarach disappearing behind the tall, slanted smokestack. At the same moment there is another gunshot, followed by an “Ahoy there!
Limnoria
!”

She glances toward the port side and is astonished to see what looks like a huge, black, humpback whale wallowing not more than fifty yards away. She shades her eyes against the brilliant sunlight and is even more astonished to see men on the whale’s back.
My stars! It’s a submarine boat!

What shows above the waves is a smoothly curved surface of overlapping iron plates, perhaps twenty or thirty feet long. In the center, at the highest point of the hump, is a squat cylindrical tower, about four feet tall and four in diameter. Small round lenses are spaced evenly around it and on top is an open hatch. Two men stand precariously on the curved hull manning a small swivel gun, while the body of a third man protrudes from the open hatch. Since he is holding a megaphone, it obviously is he who has hailed the yacht.

“Hold up, there!” he shouts across the water. “Heave to! We’re going to board you!”

This did not sound like a bad idea to Bronwyn and she stops to wave at the submersible, which is rapidly drawing closer.

“I need help!” she cries, then again, “Help!”

This is punctuated by a loud
spang!
from the ventilator beside her, and a shower of sparks, as a bullet misses her by inches. She crouches instinctively, throwing an arm up, as another bullet strikes even nearer. She leaps behind the ventilator, then cautiously peeres around it. Bugarach has used the diversion of the submersible to obtain a gun from somewhere and is firing at her from just beyond the edge of the roof, undoubtedly perched on the top rungs of a ladder. She swallows hard and makes a dash for the comparatively greater safety of the pilothouse. Bugarach’s gun crashes half a dozen times in her wake and by the time she reaches her shelter it has occurred to Bronwyn that eight shots should have emptied the chamber of any gun she is aware of. “The son of a bitch,” she growls rather than hisses, as she would have preferred, for lack of sibilants, then charges across the flat expanse of roof, sword flashing over her head like a silver pennant. Bugarach sees her coming with bulging eyes, impotently pulls the trigger of his now empty gun, throws it aside with a shriek and leaps from the ladder just as the princess reaches it. Bronwyn easily drops the five feet to the deck, landing directly behind the fleeing man.

“Stop, damn it!” she orders, but this only seems to serve to make him run faster.

They are on the starboard side of the yacht, opposite the submarine boat, and Bugarach is leading the chase toward the stem. Although her bare feet are slapping the deck as quickly as she can make them, the naked man manages to keep just beyond her reach. When they reach the awning-covered quarterdeck, she tries to cut him off on the diagonal, but he anticipates that and zigzags among the deck chairs, overturning them in her path as he runs.

He reaches the port side and begins running back toward the bow. Bronwyn sees that some men are clambering over the railing ahead, blocking the narrow deck left by the deckhouse. Bugarach seems to be oblivious of their presence and in a dozen more strides runs into their arms like a runaway locomotive into a bumper, or perhaps more like a panicked squid into a net. His arms and legs flail but it is with the ineffectual randomness of sheer hysteria and the powerful arms of his captors have no difficulty in restraining him.

Bronwyn strolls up to the group casually, sword over her shoulder, just as another black-clad figure is hoisting itself over the railing.

“Good morning,” she says, cheerily. “Welcome aboard the
Limnoria.”

“My stars! It’s Princess Bronwyn!”

“Basseliniden?” Bronwyn cries in complete astonishment, no less surprised than if the Weedking Himself had suddenly risen through the planking. She drops both her sword and her jaw without noticing. “What’re you doing here?”

The last she had seen of the man was as a black-robed, wind-blown figure on a predawn pier in Hasselt. She certainly would never have expected to see his tall figure disgorged from the bowels of a submarine boat in the middle of the Mostaza Sea, or wherever it is they are. He is smiling at her with the same slightly sarcastic expression that she had discovered is entirely misleading. He is nearly half a foot taller than she, slender though well built, with greying muttonchops, sparkling grey-green eyes, and, she notices now that he is hoodless, almost bald.

“I might ask you the same question,” he replies, “if I wasn’t more curious as to why you are chasing a naked man around this boat with a sword. It is an extraordinary sight.”

“Keep that . . . that hussy away from me!” whines Bugarach. “She’s unnatural! She’s a tart, a hussy, a wanton! She’s an
animal
!”

“What are you trying to do to him, anyway? I assume whatever it was, you had a good reason.”

“I’ve got questions for you, too. Why don’t we go into the salon and discuss them?”

“Excellent idea. What about him?”

“You’d better tie him up somewhere. We’ll be asking him some questions later, too.”

“Are you two the only ones on board?”

“No. But I don’t know how large the crew is. He told me that he’d ordered the crew to stay below no matter what. As far as I can tell, they’ve obeyed that order meticulously.”

“All right, then,” replies Basseliniden and gives the necessary orders to his own men. Half a dozen go off in search of the yacht’s crew while a length of cord is produced to bind Bugarach. Two men carry him into the salon behind Bronwyn and Basseliniden, deposit him onto a chair and leave. Bugarach glares at the remaining two as they make themselves at home in his salon.

“Would you care for a little sherry, sir?” Bronwyn asks. “It’s a Wrawwroke that I’ve been told is excellent.”