A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist

by Ron Miller

“Cut the ropes!” she cries. “Cut them! Hurry!”

  As each restraint parts, the balloon gives a convulsive lurch upward. There is a sharp crack almost simultaneous with the sound of something smacking sharply against the basket.

  “They’re shooting at us!” cries the baron.

  “What a surprise,” she answers. “There’s just two more ropes; get them undone! Hurry!”

  It is done quickly, the efforts spurred on by the increasing number of gunshots. The balloon leaps upwards so suddenly that everyone but Thud is thrown to the floor of the car. Just as suddenly there is a crash and the basket tips so violently to one side that it threatens to throw out its passengers altogether.

  “We’ve hit the trees!”

  “Throw out ballast! Quick, before we tip over!”

  The balloon has carried its basket directly into the tops of the trees that surround the aerodrome. The limbs and branches are snapping with a sound that rivals that of the gunfire from below. Branches are also becoming entangled with the ropes that attach the basket to the load ring above it; anchored thus, the balloon, carried by the slight breeze, is tipping further and further toward the horizontal. The car itself is nearly in that plane and its panicked occupants have to hang on for fear of tumbling out. At the same time, however, they have to try to cut loose as many of the bags of sand that hang from around the outside rim of the car as they possibly can. All the while the basket shakes violently in every direction, as though it were a cup in the hands of some god-like gambler and Bronwyn and her friends its dice.

  Gyven, his face and upper body being painfully lashed by the whipping branches, is hanging over the edge of the car, sawing at the cords attaching the ballast. He gives a sudden cry and the balloon shoots into the sky like a rocket. Gyven is thrown back on top of Bronwyn who in turn collides with the baron. All three give thanks to Musrum that Thud remains standing.

  The aerostat quickly rises to an equilibrium altitude where it assumes a gentle, horizontal motion away from the aerodrome. Its altitude is scarcely more than two thousand feet, but to Bronwyn it might as well be miles. She has never been further from the ground than the towers of her home and even the view from that modest altitude always gave her a giddy sense of vertigo. Still, although she looks over the padded edge of the car warily, fearful of extending any more of her body into space than necessary, clutching the ropes to either side with a vise-like grip, the view is not as frightening as she has supposed it would be. She rapidly begins to enjoy the sensation. This is, she realizes, because of the lack of perspective. When she looked from a tower window there would always be the wall beneath her tapering toward the earth below. Here, there is nothing between her and the ground but empty air. So far as she can tell from any visual evidence, the balloon might as well be drifting a few yards above some exquisitely detailed scale model.

  Since the horizon, however, still appears to be at eye level, naturally, Bronwyn has the uncanny sensation of being suspended above the center of a gigantic bowl.

  The city beneath her is lovely. Wherever there are districts illuminated by electric light, they glimmer and twinkle like a handful of sequins scattered on deep purple velvet. A broad band of pink light along the horizon is growing brighter, suffusing the city with a rosy glow. Rubies and diamonds, thinks the entranced princess.

  “Bronwyn?” the baron says, breaking the spell. “Can you help me?”

  She turns to see that Milnikov and Thud are helping Gyven into a comfortable position against some of the bundles. The man’s jacket has been ripped in a dozen places by the branches that had flailed him. Had it not been for the tough leather coat, he would have been lacerated like a sailor under the cat. As it was, only his face has been badly injured, and there are two or three places where his back and shoulders have been cut. The blood, however, looks terrible: Gyven’s face is streaked with it and it has splashed his coat and soaked his shirt.

  “Musrum!” she says.

  “Can you make some bandages?” asks the baron.

  “Yes, I’ve got a spare shirt I can use,” she replies, immediately unfastening one of the bundles.

  “I’ve got some spirits we can use as a disinfectant.”

  “It looks a lot worse than it is,” says Gyven reassuringly, with a fairly successful smile.

  “I’m glad to no end to hear that,” says the princess, “since it looks terrible.”

  Between his two enthusiastic nurses, Gyven is quickly cleaned and bandaged. As he had promised, the wounds, though they have bled copiously, indeed look worse than they turned out to be. Once he has been assured that Gyven is in no danger, Milnikov lets Bronwyn complete the dressing of his wounds.

  “Thank you, Princess,” Gyven says.

  She looks up at his words and finds his eyes scant inches from her own. They are an iridescent grey, almost silver in the early morning light. She can see a miniature of her own face mirrored in one of them like an image in a garden viewing ball and there is a dizzying sense of free-fall, for a vertiginous moment she thinks the bottom of the car has vanished. Not being able to stop herself, she places a hand on Gyven’s brow. It is the first time she has ever touched him. The skin is like fine-grained marble.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course. I . . . is just about to ask you that.”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “These are comfortable?” she asks, smoothing the bandages that cross his chest. The muscles are as sharp-edged and hard as the armor plates on a battleship. Emboldened beyond all belief, she allows a finger to brush a nipple and immediately she feels her body clench to one-half its original size and she gasps as though someone has just filled her stomach with ice.

  “Princess?”

  “I’m all right!” she cries, backing away. “I’m . . . I’m . . . it’s just a reaction . . . I’m sorry . . . nerves . . .”

  “Here,” offers the baron, “take a sip of this.”

  She takes the proffered cup and swallows the thick, aromatic fluid. It burns and soothes simultaneously, filling her head with fragrant vapors, replacing the strange vapors already swirling there.

  “Which way are we going?” she finally manages to ask, glad to have thought of anything as a new subject.

  “I’m not too sure,” replies Milnikov. “I’m no navigator, but I’d hazard a guess that we’re heading more or less northeasterly.”

  “That’s not too good. I’d rather be heading directly east or southeast, if possible, toward Udskaya.”

  “East too much will take us to Ibraila,” puts in Gyven.

  “Musrum forbid!”

  “Northeast will eventually take us over water.”

  “I know.”

  An hour passes without much additional conversation, as each of the four relax and organize what wits they might have remaining to them. Gyven drifts into a light sleep, Thud leans his chin on the parapet and gazes into the horizon thinking only Musrum knew what, Milnikov sits on the floor of the car, knees drawn to his chin, deep in thought. Bronwyn sits atop the bundles of supplies, alternately watching the drifting landscape and the drowsing Gyven.

  Her thoughts tumble over one another like the loose parts of some machine being shaken from a sack. Her disturbing feelings about Gyven are mixed with her uncertainties and self-doubts in ways they were never meant to. Yet one thought keeps merging into other, unrelated ones in nonsensical metamorphoses. She is unable to grasp one long enough to make any kind of sense of it.

  When she had begun her adventure more than a year ago it had possessed all the spirit of a lark. It had been generated by spite and retaliation for the most part, and a few good intentions, but Bronwyn had been so certain of its outcome that to her it had been little more than a game. She had planned, in her mind, how every detail would occur . . . that she needed only do this and this for that and that to happen. One two three. Simple. Unfortunately, things had begun to go wrong fr
om the very beginning. It had been a very difficult thing for her to understand and deal with. She needs to know exactly what the outcome of anything might be, yet doesn’t realize that most of her elaborate expectations are little more than fictions and that reality has no compulsion to adhere to her preconceptions.

  It is a blow to a self-confidence that she now is realizing is only a little less fictional than her worldview. Nearly two decades of being treated as though everything she did, thought and said is worthless has had its effect, no matter what sort of façade she has erected to give an impression to the contrary. The only really unfortunate thing is that she has ultimately come to believe in the reality of the façade, rather than what it is hiding.

  Bronwyn didn’t know what the future held and she didn’t know what she could do about it.

  It gradually occurs to her that it is no longer getting lighter, in fact, the sky is appreciably darkening.

  “Baron?”

  “Hm?”

  “The sky’s getting dark. There’s going to be a storm.”

  “Let’s see,” he says, clambering to his feet. “I hope not.”

  He scans the horizon. Where the sun had been rising is now a dull, amorphous mass and the undersides of the clouds around the balloon are a dirty bottle-green. The air, already chilly, has gotten colder and moister.

  “You’re right: it doesn’t look good, I’m afraid. But I don’t know if it matters or not. I know little about aviation, but since the balloon is carried by the wind we may stay ahead of the storm.”

  “Sounds plausible.”

  “Would we be in any danger during a storm?” asks Gyven.

  “To tell you the truth,” replies the princess, “I really don’t know. It doesn’t sound as though it’ll be particularly safe.”

  “You sound pretty certain that a storm is coming.”

  “I am, Baron. I’m counting on it.”

  “What’s that?” interrupts Thud, speaking his first words since leaving the aerodrome.

  “What?”

  “That.”

  “Where?”

  “There,” he replies, pointing into the wind.

  “I don’t see a thing,” says the baron.

  “I do,” says the princess. “It looks like another balloon.”

  “Another balloon?”

  “That’s what it looks like. I can barely make it out, but it looks like a round black dot.”

  “Think it’s someone chasing us?” asks Gyven from the floor of the car.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference if it was,” answers the baron. “They’re carried by the same wind we are . . . they can’t go any faster.”

  “The airship could though, couldn’t it?” asks Gyven.

  “You’re right!”

  “The airship?” asks Bronwyn.

  “Gyven’s right. I’m certain that’s what it is.”

  “Could they catch us?”

  “It’s likely. They have engines that add to the speed of the wind. If that is the airship, then it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to us. You spent a lot of time talking to Wittenoom and his cohorts, Princess. Do you have any idea how fast that thing can travel?”

  “I have no idea; they are still testing it. I know that it doesn’t go very fast, though. That is one of its problems.”

  “Hm. It must be at least ten miles away, maybe more. It’s hard to judge distances like this.”

  “I remember it making a round trip from Toth to Fladler and back in six hours.”

  “Let’s see, it’s fifteen miles to Fladler, or thereabouts, thirty miles for a round trip. That’s only five miles an hour! No wonder you says they had problems with speed. If that’s as fast as they can go, they couldn’t fly in anything but a dead calm.” He gestures at the distant point. “It’s madness! This wind is becoming a gale, they can’t have any hope of returning against it!”

  “Five miles an hour . . . they could catch up with us in two or three hours, then? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  “We can go up or down . . . that’s all. There’s no way we can steer the balloon.”

  “I have a thought,” offers Gyven, pulling himself to his feet. “Is it possible there might be currents in the atmosphere just as there are currents at sea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, perhaps if we rose or fell, we might find a different current of air. Perhaps one going a different direction, or at a different speed.”

  “Is that possible?” asks Bronwyn.

  “It sounds plausible,” replies the baron.

  “Which should it be, then? Up or down?”

  “Up, by all means.”

  Four bags of sand plummeted earthward and the balloon, relieved of the weight, mounts into the sky like a wild horse that has just slipped its bonds. Almost immediately the balloon is immersed in a thick, milky vapor as it ascends into the dense ceiling of cloud. The occupants of the basket can scarcely see one another and for some reason Bronwyn clings even more tightly to the ropes, as though a fall from six thousand feet would be worse than one from five thousand. The balloon rises for several long minutes before it passes through the cloud bank and into the clear air above. Bronwyn cries out in surprise and wonder at the incredible scenery that is spread around her.

  As far as she can see, which seems like a thousand miles through an atmosphere as clear as a vacuum, is an expanse of dazzling white billows, like villages buried beneath snow, like a churning, froth-covered sea, like glacial arctic mountains. She knows they are not only clouds, but the tops of the grey, amorphous ceiling that but moments before had seemed so gloomy and oppressive, but the billows seem as substantial as any terrestrial landscape and she can easily believe that she could step from the balloon and walk across the snowy drifts. The clouds are so large that it is impossible to detect any motion among or within them and it is only by a conscious effort of will that she acknowledges that they are as insubstantial as her own breath.

  Bronwyn’s morbid imagination reasserts itself by reminding her of how much the cloudscape resembles a graveyard in the winter, the tombstones and vaults reduced to bosomy hummocks, the balloon drifting among the monuments like a snowflake lonely as her own individuality.

  The balloon sails among the towering piles like an eagle lost among alpine peaks. The sky above the white plain is intensely blue, shading to an infinite indigo directly overhead (or as much of the zenith that the balloon isn’t eclipsing).

  “Look!” cries Bronwyn.

  The balloon is passing not far from a nearly vertical expanse of cloud, like a fly about to land on a wall, and the balloon’s shadow is being cast upon it by the lowering sun, a deep blue circle that looks like a tunnel bored through the sky. But what had caused the princess to cry out are the concentric rings of brilliant colors that surrounded the shadow. Colors of an intense purity, red, blue, yellow, green, red, blue, yellow, green, repeating themselves as they grow further from the shadow and fainter, eventually merging into the white of the cloud.

  “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!” she whispers.

  “Chromatic refraction,” mutters Gyven in an awed tone.

  “It looks like a target,” says Thud, rather spoiling things.

  “Look, there is a storm,” says the baron, pointing in the direction of the sun. Turning to look, Bronwyn sees a sight as breathtaking as the corona had been, but many times more frightening: an enormous thunderhead, towering tens of thousands of feet above them, its top sheared off by gale-force winds into an anvil that Musrum could have forged planets upon. It is many miles away, yet is still the single largest object that Bronwyn has ever seen. Deep within its base blue-violet light pulsed and throbbed.

  “I’d hate to get caught in that,” says Milnikov.

  “I’m hungry,” says Thud.

  “And I’m freezing,” adds Bronwyn, whose choice of clothing had been based upon ruggedness rather than warmth. “Can’t we go back down?”

  “Good idea,” a
grees the baron. “We just need to release some gas, I suppose.”

  “Pull on the rope coming out of the mouth of the balloon,” Bronwyn instructs.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “As you say, I ask a lot of questions. Just give it a short pull; the balloon won’t react right away and we don’t want to start descending too quickly.”

  “All right.” The baron gives a tug on the rope. He and Bronwyn both expect to hear the gas hissing as it escaped, but there is no sound.

  “Did it work?” she asks.

  “I don’t think we’re moving.”

  “Yes, we are! But awfully slowly; pull the rope again.”

  This time the balloon begins to sink more rapidly. It drops through the cloud deck and comes to a state of equilibrium just below. The entire aspect of the lower atmosphere has altered in just the short time they had been above the clouds. The air is moist and grey, with a distinct greenish cast. Dark curtains of rain veil the horizon, shifting in the wind like dirty draperies. Lightning spits and crackles in the distance and Bronwyn can feel the downy hairs on her neck and arms bristling, as they had done inTudela’s laboratory.

  “This reminds me far too vividly of that night atop the prison,” says the baron, nervously.

  “Me, too,” replies the princess.

  “Can we avoid the storm?” asks Gyven.

  “I don’t know,” answers Bronwyn. “I’d think that we’d travel with it. Let’s wait and see . . . we can’t keep wasting gas and ballast going up and down.”

  “Is there anything to eat?”

  “That’s a good idea, Thud; we’ll see. Baron, did you and Gyven bring any food?”

  “No, there is neither time nor opportunity.”

  “Thud and I got some things from the kitchen yesterday,” says Gyven, “on the pretext of going on a picnic, enough for at least one sparse meal among the four of us, anyway. Let’s see what came with the balloon. Look here.” He holsd up a jar of some preserved food and a cylindrical loaf of bread. “The bread’s a little stale, but not bad, I think, and we’ll see what’s in these jars.”

  “Hm,” hums the baron, taking one of them. “It appears that at least one of the official aerialists is an Ibrailan.”