A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  “What happened to the Smiling Scrod?” the captain wonders aloud. “Did the entire fleet go down in that storm?”

  “I haven’t given the other ships a single thought,” replies the horrified princess. “Do you think that they might have? What’ll we do if they did?”

  “I don’t know,” says Basseliniden seriously. “We’ll just have to see.”

  The captain begins waving his own jacket at the approaching waif, while the princess had completely forgotten about the professor and his plight.

  Holy Musrum, What if the fleet is lost? What will I do then? Without Thud. Without Gyven, without the Baron, without the Duke, without my army . . . what am I to do? Sue Payne and Ferenc?

  By now she can hear the thin, reedy shouts of Wittenoom who, apparently, has finally recognized his fellow castaways. After a few more moments, his raft draws to within a few yards of the princess’s. The professor deftly strikes his sail, which Bronwyn now sees is nothing more than a large blanket, and coasts to a halt.

  “Hello, princess!” he shouts cheerily in greeting. “Hello, Captain Basseliniden! How are you?”

  “Hello, yourself,” replies the captain. “What happened to your ship?”

  “My ship? Oh, that really is unfortunate. Did you know that we were hit by a monstrous tempest? It was terrible!”

  “Yes, we rather guessed.”

  “It was the worst I’ve seen since aught aught.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know if I can adequately explain it to you. All I can remember is a great deal of darkness, noise and water. Fortunately, so it appears, I’d thrown myself onto a hatch cover and is clutching its grid like a limpet when the ship capsized and I and the hatch cover are thrown free. That’s really all I can remember until daylight. I’d been wrapped in this blanket when I rushed onto the deck to see what all the disturbance is about, so I employed it, along with a little wreckage that’d been providentially floating nearby, as a sail and here I am.”

  “It’s lucky for you that you know how to sail.”

  “Me? I’ve never been on so much as a rowboat before in all my life!”

  “Then how . . . ?”

  “Simple aerodynamics. Elementary, really, though it isn’t strictly within my field.”

  “Professor,” interrupts the princess, “do you know anything about navigation? Where are we? How can we get to land?”

  “That’s ridiculously simple.”

  “You know where we are, then?”

  “No, I haven’t the slightest idea. I meant that it’ll be simple enough to find out. It just haven’t occurred to me that it might be useful to try.”

  “Let’s get the rafts together, first,” offers Basseliniden.

  “Excellent idea!” responds the professor.

  By tying a light cord to one of his shoes (the princess having lost hers back on the Sommer B.), the captain is able to throw one end to the waiting professor, who then uses it to draw to himself a heavier rope. A few minutes later, the two rafts are side by side and while the captain lashes them securely, the princess greets Wittenoom with a handshake.

  “It’s good to see you, professor. Do you have any food?”

  “Not a crumb, I’m afraid. I take it from your question that you’re a little short of provisions yourself?”

  “Everything is lost with the ship.”

  “That ship?” the professor asks, pointing to the Sommer B., whose mast stumps and deck house still protrude above sea level.

  “Yes.”

  “Reached a state of temporary equilibrium, has it?”

  “If you say so,” replies the princess, a little sourly.

  “Well, then, if there are still any supplies on board, why can’t we recover them?”

  “The galley and its storeroom are under water, for one thing.”

  “So?”

  “And the ship is likely to sink any second, for another.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. If is going to sink suddenly it would have by now, I would say.”

  “You’re not suggesting that we try to get back aboard it, are you?” asks the horrified princess.

  “Why not? Are you suggesting that we starve, instead?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Well then, there you are!”

  “What’re you suggesting?” puts in Basseliniden.

  “Surely there must be a large quantity of canned and preserved goods that haven’t been harmed by their brief immersion. It should be simple enough to recover them.”

  “Simple enough for whom?”

  “Why, you, surely, captain,” answers the professor with some surprise. “Who else?”

  “Who else?” repeats Basseliniden.

  “If there’s a chance that there is food that we can use,” puts in Bronwyn, “I think you should try and get it.”

  “You do, eh? Well, you can just forget it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did it sound like?”

  “It sounded,” says the princess with a sneer, “like a coward talking.”

  Basseliniden stiffens and for a moment he doesn’t reply. “My courage has nothing to do with it. It’s just that the risk hardly seems necessary. We can’t be more than fifty miles in any direction, except north, from some shore. And these are busy waters, besides. Why should I risk my life for a few soggy groceries when we’ll either make landfall or be picked up in a day or two at the most? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But I’m hungry!”

  “Well, that’s just too bad.”

  Bronwyn’s lips tighten and her eyes narrow to a pair of level slits that look like the kind of icy slivers one gets from splintering an emerald with a hammer. She can look intimidatingly frightening with almost no conscious effort whatsoever and without a second’s thought. That the captain is actually making a lot of sense never occurs to her, not that it would have made a lot of difference if it had. Basseliniden, who knows in his heart that he is right, nevertheless finds apologies and excuses rising to his lips, dragged there by the almost actinic glare of her face.

  “All right,” she finally says. “At least now I know exactly where you stand.” Before the captain can defend himself against these unfair accusations, she turns to the professor, who stands in some embarrassment and confusion. “Do you think you can determine where we are? Even approximately?”

  “Oh, well, I should think so,” he stutters. “It’s nearly nightfall; if the Polar Parallelogram is visible I shouldn’t have much difficulty in at least discovering our latitude with some accuracy.”

  “Aren’t there some instruments you need?”

  “It would be nice, of course, but I think I can make what I need easily enough . . . at least if twilight holds out long enough.”

  The professor squats on the surface of the raft, folding up his long legs in a disjointed manner that makes Bronwyn certain that be possesses more joints and angles than are normally allotted a human being. He pulls a small notebook from a breast pocket and from it tears a single leaf. He then proceeds to fold it several times, until it forms a very narrow triangle. Unfolding the paper reveals a series of very equally spaced lines all radiating from the same point. Wittenoom then, with a stub of pencil, divides the spaces between the creases even further.

  “You’ve made a protractor!” cries the princess.

  “Yes, indeed! Now all that is necessary is to measure the height above the horizon of the indicator star in the Polar Parallelogram. The angle will tell us our latitude. I need a string and a small weight, however, to make a plumb.”

  “Here,” says Basseliniden, pulling a short piece of heavy thread from the hem of his coat. “This and a buckle should do.”

  “Excellent!” cries the professor, while the princess looks at the captain as though he has just intruded on a private conversation. Basseliniden ignores her.

  Night falls swiftly, with little twilight. The sky remains overcast, much to the princess’s disgust and anxi
ety. The raft moves almost imperceptibly as it rises and falls with the broad swells and only the sound of the water lapping beneath the raft gives Bronwyn any sign that she is at sea. Neither she nor the captain have spoken since their discussion about salvaging supplies from the foundered Sommer B.

  Although the season is well into late spring, the high latitude and recent storm leav the night air damp and chilly; as soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops dramatically. The princess, left with only a light jacket and clothes that are still moist from her plunge, huddles into a shivering ball. She can not remember when she has ever felt so comprehensively cold, and wonders if she has stopped metabolizing entirely. The captain watches her discomfort with considerable sympathy, but is going to be damned if he will offer any immediate comfort.

  The professor seems to take no notice of either the damp or the cold, but instead remains fixedly staring at a particular spot in the featureless black sky. So the three remain for the next several hours: one oblivious of his discomfort and surroundings, one miserable and stubborn and one perhaps a little less miserable but peeved.

  Shortly before midnight, the princess and the captain are startled out of their respective black reveries by a cry from the professor.

  “What is it?” croaks Bronwyn.

  “There!” cries Wittenoom. “Stars!”

  “Stars?” she echoes, stupidly, “Where?”

  But instead of answering, the professor has placed his makeshift astrolabe to his eyes. His feet are braced solidly on the deck, his long, thin legs as stiff and straight as the legs of a surveyor’s transit. In spite of the slow rocking of the raft, the buckle at the end of the thread barely wavers from the vertical.

  Bronwyn stares at the sudden appearance of the stars. She immediately finds the Parallelogram and from that her eyes sweep outward in an ever-broadening spiral. She had once been as absorbed by the geography of the heavens, which is all that astronomy is, or at least so far as her Tamlaghtan education had been concerned, as she was by the geography of the earth. When she had commited to memory virtually every square inch of her enormous terrestrial globe, as pale and blue-veined as some vast breast: a spherical, geodesic, topographic mammary upon which her far-ranging imagination have suckled, she turned to the blue-black globes that hovered in the chambers of her brother’s tutors. Speckled with silvery stars and bound by golden lines, the constellations mirror images of their familiar shapes, the globes were universes turned wrong side out. She felt as Musrum must feel, looking at his creation from the Other Side and being amazed and amused at how small and self-contained they seemed to be.

  She easily identified other, nearby constellations, the Rabbit, the Eggbeater, St. Wladimir, Musrum’s Nose, the Greater and Lesser Milkcans, and recalled how she had spent many nights on a palace parapet recasting the ancient sky drawings. There is, she feels, nothing official about them, they are merely the result of a few centuries of bored shepherds playing connect-the-dot. She thinks that the Rabbit looks a good deal more like a race horse and, if she combined some of the Oxcart with most of the Eyedropper she can imagine a grand sloop cutting through the stars, leaving a milky wake in its silent passing.

  “Fifty-two degrees!” the professor cries, checking the mark he has just made on the edge of his paper protractor, then immediately replaces it to his eyes. “Fifty-three degrees,” he says after repeating the process, then: “Fifty-two! Fifty-two! Flfty-three!” Then: “Gone! The clouds have come back again.”

  “Fifty-two or fifty-three degrees,” says the princess, as a dark curtain closes over her clinquant theater. “Does that tell you where we are?”

  “Only along a line running east and west,” replies the professor. “That is, I know only approximately how far we are from the equator.”

  “Well,” put in Basseliniden, “we know we surely must be somewhere between the peninsula of Piotr and the east coast of Guesclin.”

  “Oh, we can narrow it down a little more closely than that. Most of the north shore of Londeac lies at or above fifty-two degrees north latitude. Surely if we are east of, say, fifteen degrees of longitude, or so, we would either be within sight of land or on land itself. The same goes for the west. If we are as far in that direction as ten or eleven degrees, once again we would be in sight of land. I can think of only one place that would allow us to be at sea as far south as fifty-two or three degrees.”

  “And that is?” asks the princess.

  “Guesclin Bay.”

  The princess frowns for a moment, consulting her mental atlas. “Guesclin Bay?” she repeats. “Guesclin Bay? Why, that’s the entrance to the Strait!”

  “Oh yes, indeed it is!”

  “Holy Musrum!” she mutters, in absolute awe at the perversity of her fortune.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DESPERATE STRAITS

  The Strait of Guesclin is narrow enough for much of its length to be perhaps better called a river, especially since, year round, a powerful current sweeps the cold waters of the Mostaza Sea into the warmer waters of the ocean to the south. It is in form a vast, precipitous canyon, a rift between the continent of Londeac and the island of Guesclin, as though the single landmass have been torn apart, like a ripped map or a shared cookie. In actual fact, this is precisely what had happened, or, more accurately, what is in the process of happening. Vast forces deep within the planet are graduaily and inexorably tearing the single continental mass asunder and, as the geologists of Londeac are just becoming aware, the great canyon of the Strait continued underwater for, perhaps, hundreds of miles to the north and south. By the slightest fraction of an inch every century, Guesclin is receding from the rest of the world. This is an appealing fact whose actuality and symbolism would have not only been appreciated but even applauded by the xenophobic people of Tamlaght, the country occupying the major part of Guesclin, have they been aware of it. Unfortunately, since science in general and foreign science in particular are anathema to the Tamlaghtans, they are not.

  The Strait runs almost exactly north and south, its vertical cliffs broken only by two wildly inaccessible embayments halfway along its course. These are the sites of fearsome seasonal whirlpools. At places, especially within the northern fifty miles or so, the Strait narrows to less than ten miles in width; it is quite easy to see the opposite shore from either side of the abyss. At their greatest height the brinks of the chasm are half a mile above the surging flood. More than one ambitious Londeacan engineer has dreamed of bridging that gap and thereby assuring a reputation that would be little less than immortal. However, the idea of a physical link to the continent, a veritable pipeline for foreign ideas, let alone foreigners, is so appalling to Tamlaght that thinly disguised threats of war, in the event that such a scheme should ever even begin to be implemented, effectively squelched the periodically recurring grandiose project.

  For most of the year the Strait is merely treacherous, yet nevertheless navigable, if just barely. A few experienced mariners make the trip every season, some even on a more or less regular basis. The waters of the Strait are for the most part deep (a cross section of its profile would reveal a V-shaped cleft whose bottom, at certain points, lay under more than five hundred feet of water) and as long as a captain is careful to avoid the jagged rocks that lined the steeply sloping sides the journey can be made with some assurance of safety. Which of course did not prevent a dozen more foolhardy or inexperienced ships from coming to grief every year, shredded against the rugged walls of the canyon like cheese in a grater.

  However, during one particular season even the most courageous and experienced old salt would laugh derisively at the suggestion that the Strait be traversed. At that time of the year, currents shift and the icy waters of the Mostaza Sea come thundering through the Strait with a velocity and power that can only be adequately compared to the impression a child’s copper poenig must have, if any, as it lies on the rail in the path of an oncoming express freight train.

  For nearly two months the flood thunders through
the narrow channel with a sound that can be heard hours before an overland tourist reaches the cliffs, and feels a full day before that. The low permanent clouds, spanning a quarter of the horizon’s azimuth marking the width of the Strait, can be seen a hundred miles away. The visitor who, with great trepidation, approaches the rusty, slippery iron railing that has been installed for his safety and which suddenly looks pitifully inadequate, feeling the solid granite beneath his feet quivering and bouncing like gelatine and with the sound palpably overflowing the rim of the canyon making speech impossible, are there anything conceivably appropriate and nontrivial to say, finds himself gripping the wet, rusting bars with a white-knuckled grasp as he peers with grim fascination over the yawning, inviting brink. A damp, icy updraft raises his hair upon end, or so he explains physically the physiological phenomenon to his overobservant and mocking companions.

  At first little is seen other than swirling white mists that rise toward the visitor in cumuloid columns. But these break, leaving ragged holes through which the Torrent is revealed . . . some three thousand vertiginous feet below. Violence incarnate, if incarnate is a word that can properly be used in describing water, looking like nothing else so much as some sort of vast, albino snake, a bleached anaconda, writhing and twisting in unpredictable and tortuous knots and coils, as though it are not just angry or anxious to escape the confines of the rocky walls, but twisting with disturbing, sudden spasms that made it seem as though it are afflicted with some kind of terrible neurological disease. As its endless lengths unfurl between the granite walls, it shatters the grey stone and slabs the size of apartment buildings crash into its liquid spine.

  The Strait of Guesclin during full spring flood is rightly considered not only one of the seven wonders of the world, but at the very least among the top three, or so the visitor and his friends would agree as they share lukewarm drinks in the shabby little concessionaire’s stand that vibrates like a trackside tenement not far from the Brink of Hell.