by Ron Miller
“Sure you do. Get ‘em from Smelly Nell’s”
“Wonderful. Is it about time for one?”
“Huh? I dunno. I guess so.”
“We sure can use something to eat.”
“I’ll have to ask the magistrate.”
“Well,” says the princess, after their jailer has gone on his mission, and throwing herself onto the twanging cot, “what a miserable little town this is.”
“At least they don’t know who you are.”
“How long will that last, do you think? Word is bound to filter down here sooner or later. I don’t think that Payne would believe that I’m dead unless he personally sees my body . . . not any longer, at any rate. If he’s not satisfied with just knowing that my ship is lost, he will intensify his search. And even this godforsaken place won’t go overlooked for long.”
“So the longer we stay here, the more likely it is that someone will discover who you are.”
“That’s exactly it. Besides, what’s happened to the rest of my army? What happened to the other ships during the storm? Both your ship and mine are lost. Are all the others wrecked, as well?”
“I’d like to know that, too. If the Barracuda, with all of my equipment and devices is lost, I don’t know how I can help you.”
“We’re at the far end of nowhere here. There’ll be no news.” She sits on the hard edge of her cot, slumped dejectedly. “We can’t just sit here for ten days. No matter how far out of the way this degenerate toilet of a town is, word about us is bound to arrive, officially or unofficially. In any case, we can’t stay here; we can’t have come this far for nothing.”
“How far are we from Blavek, do you think?”
“Holy Musrum, we must be seven or eight hundred miles from the capital. Maybe four hundred miles or so from the most likely place for the fleet to have landed, somewhere between the Strait and Stuckney Bay . . . if they weren’t all lost on the Grand Bank. If that happened, I don’t know what we can do. And if they are there, we’d have to travel through almost trackless country to join them.”
“Let me think about it.”
He thinks for three days. During that time, Bronwyn became ever more impatient and irritable, making her even more irascible and sarcastic than normal. They are fed at irregular but not overlong intervals, and far better than she might have expected, based upon her one experience with the cuisine of the poverty-stricken village. Evidently, with the loss of Smelly Nell’s, the chore of feeding the town’s prisoners has fallen upon a more capable, if not more hygienic, individual. Bread, a thin soup and water is the invariable menu. Bronwyn and the professor each have a deep wooden bowl they are allowed to keep, as well as a tin cup. To Bronwyn’s surprise they are also provided a short, thick tallow candle, as big as her fist, that smells like burning fish oil (naturally) but at least provides a warm, if dim, glow at night. They are not allowed to have matches or any other way to start a fire; every evening the jailer lights the candle for them and it is thereafter the responsibility of the prisoners to husband the candle if they wish to have light on subsequent nights. They see no one except their jailer, a small, scrawny man who looks as though he is covered with some sort of crust.
The princess and the professor had not been given any clothes to replace the ones they had been wearing when arrested. Bronwyn is still wearing the same calf-length trousers and long-sleeved blouse, both of a grey, homespun cloth, she had been given by Captain Prittly and is of course still barefoot. She tries to reserve a little of her drinking water for washing, but is rapidly and distressingly losing ground. She can smell herself and she hates being able to do that. Almost as much as she thinks she hates Basseliniden. She tries very hard to hate him as much as she does Payne or Ferenc, but without the degree of success she really hopes for. It is not, she considers, that she feels particularly generous, it is just that she feels very tired. She is, in fact, finding it increasingly difficult to summon the emotional energy she possessed even a year ago.
On the evening of the fourth day, near midnight, or at least several hours after the princess and the professor have frugally extinguished their candle, Brownyn hears a hard thunk, as though something hard had fallen onto the floor of the cell. She climbs from her cot and sees, centered in the trapezoid of faint blue moonlight on the floor, a rock. Someone, she realizes, must have thrown or dropped it through the window. Picking it up she discovers is a folded piece of paper attached to it with a string. Removing this and unfolding it she can just see that the paper is covered with writing, but the light is too faint to read it and she, of course, has no way to relight the candle. In order not to awaken the professor, who is buzzing lightly in the depth of his slumber, she decides that she would have to wait until morning to see what the message is.
At dawn’s first light, Bronwyn takes the paper from beneath her pillow and looks at it. A deep vertical furrow appears in her brow directly above her long nose. This is what she sees:
TTJUK HLA+UI LWLLo TR..YY wluyD WEJAL .YOUS
ALJDL ,LA.L R++RKIR ELAJC ALF3E LWMFL AJc!A
ALJEM ALJEM ooME? //AME WLEMP .TYE. QlcNE
ALKMn NNLEP bKENS ss47? KME;L A; . . . EEMEE
“What’s that?” asks the professor, rising from his bed.
“I’m not sure. Someone tossed it through the window last night tied to a rock.”
“May I see it?”
She hands him the wrinked paper and the scientist, after screwing his pince-nez onto his nose, scrutinizes it closely, turning it over and around, and even examining the apparently blank backside.
“Hm,” he says.
“What do you think it is?”
“It’s some sort of code or cypher.”
“I think I figured that much out. Can you tell what it says?”
“No, but perhaps after I work on it . . .” And he did, for almost two days without pause, scratching endless and, to the princess, meaningless, scribbles on the stone walls. She quickly begins to grow sorry that she had shown the thing to him, since it meant losing the only company she had. At noon on their seventh day of incarceration she begins to badger the professor for some sort of progress report, even if a negative one.
“I’m afraid that is just what I’ve have to conclude,” he tells her.
“What’s that?”
“That I can make nothing of this. All I can imagine is that it is intended for some other prisoner.”
“We’re just jumping to the conclusion that it is a message for us?”
“Probably.”
“Whoever it’s from must have either thought that someone else is here, or he threw the stone through the wrong window. Probably whoever it is really for would know how to decode the message.”
“Undoubtedly. There must be some key without which the message is indecipherable.”
“This is all just a waste of time, then.”
“Oh, not at all! It’s been extremely enjoyable.”
“How can you say that? You’ve spent a day and a half and you’re just as mystified as when you started.”
“So?”
On the evening of that seventh day, after the jailer had lit their candle and left, Professor Wittenoom says, “I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
Instead of answering her directly, he says, “See if you can unscrew one of the legs from your cot.”
Puzzled, the princess complies. The bed is made of iron pipes joined by straight, angled and T-shaped couplings. The legs are capped by feet that screw on. She carefully turns the bed over so that its legs protrude vertically and, sitting on the floor with her legs on either side of one of the iron pipes, grasps and tries to turn it. It seemed welded together. The metal is flaky with rust and her palms turn red with it. She wraps the long tail of her blouse around her hands and tries again, bracing her feet against the iron framework. She thinks she can feel the pipe give a fraction of an inch. Bracing herself once more, she tries twisting the pipe again. Her face reddens and her arms cord with muscl
es she hadn’t even been aware she had. She gives a grunt of surprise and satisfaction when the pipe gives another fraction of an inch. Her next efforts are progressively easier until finally she is able to unscrew the leg completely.
“What do I do with it now?”
“Give it to me, please.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have an idea,” he repeats, and she can get no other answer from the scientist. She watches, curiously, as he tears pages from his precious notebook, shreds them, and places them to soak in the waterbowl. Soon he has a sodden mass of papier-mâché as big as both his fists together. This he packs into the pipe. While he does so, he asks the princess if she would remove one of the endcaps from one of the other bed legs. This is more difficult than unscrewing a leg, but after a great deal of perspiration and guttural muttering she manages. By the time she hands Wittenoom the cup-shaped piece of threaded iron he has the foot-long pipe filled with soggy paper. Taking the cap from her, he screws it tightly onto the open end.
He then empties what water remains in the bowl onto the floor and dries the bowl on his shirttail. The remaining pages of his notebook are then torn and placed in the container, crumpled into a dense wad. All the while he puffs at his pipe as though possessed with the idea that it might extinguish itself.
Bronwyn has given up guessing and sits on the floor, crosslegged, watching him with a kind of resigned fascination.
The next bizarre operation the professor performs is to tear long strips from his shirt, until he has perhaps fifteen or twenty ribbons an inch or so wide and three feet or so in length. There is now a sizable gap between the professor’s shirt and the top of his trousers. Bronwyn is shocked to see how far his ribs protrude.
Setting the ribbons aside, he ignites the shredded paper with the candle, blows out the wick and places the candle in the tin cup. He holds the cup above the flaming bowl until the tallow has completely melted. Taking the ribbons of fabric, he places them into the melted fat, occasionally reheating the container to keep the tallow liquid, until the cup is filled with a mixture of cloth and congealing fat.
While the mass is still warm and pliable, Wittenoom uses it to coat the outside of the iron pipe until it resembled a fat, translucent grub.
“Set the beds up on edge,” he says to the princess, speaking for the first time in nearly an hour, “as closely to the bars as you can.”
Bronwyn does so, realizing that the beds now look disturbingly like barricades. Meanwhile the professor places the tallow and cloth-wrapped pipe on the windowsill, jammed tightly between two of the iron bars.
Using the last glowing ember from the bowl, he ignites a protruding tatter of cloth. It immediately flares like a torch. The professor carefully watches his creation, which after a few moments is now flaming with a distinct roar with melting tallow drooling oily down the cell wall. Satisfied, he casually joins the princess, who, correctly discerning their purpose, has already taken her place behind the upturned mattresses.
“Get as far down as you can and hold your ears,” he suggests.
“What . . .” is as far as whatever question it is she is going to ask gets when there is a tremendous explosion, a wicked crack like a bullwhip artist flicking a mosquito from the air an inch from her ear. She feels the bed pummeled as though by grapeshot and the bars behind her ring like the chimes of a glockenspiel as a thousand fragments of iron and brick strike them.
The air is filled with a coarse dust that immediately begins to settle on her. Choking, she rises from behind her shelter. As she spits gritty fragments from her tongue, she looks in amazement at how the window has been transformed. What had been a two-foot iron-barred square is now a two-and-a-half-foot-diameter opening, unbarred.
“What did you do?”
“Steam power, mostly,” replies the professor, grasping her hand and pulling her toward the gap. He peers through it. “Only a short drop to the ground. We’re on the second floor, but, as I’d noticed earlier, the building is set into a hill so that the second-floor rear windows are no higher above the ground than those of the first floor front.”
“Can you get through?”
“Certainly. But you go first, Princess.”
“But . . .”
“You must hurry; the explosion will surely have attracted someone, even as late as it is!”
Having made her token protest, Bronwyn needs no other encouragement. She pulls herself through the hole, clumsily and awkwardly, eventually managing to get her legs swung around so she can make the four-foot hop to the earth below. She lands in soft mud, silently, and steps aside to make room for Wittenoom, who joins her only a second later, his body so long and loosely built that he appears to arrive in sections.
“Hurry!” Bronwyn whispers; already she can hear voices from somewhere inside the building.
“Which way?” the professor asks.
“Don’t you have some idea?”
“Why should I? I’ve never been here before in my life.”
“You thought out our escape!”
“Oh, that was elementary. I was rather counting on you after that.”
Bronwyn tries to recall something of what she had seen of the town earlier in the week, and tries to adjust her orientation to account for their present situation.
“This way,” she says, pointing up the alleyway. “It goes uphill, so it ought to lead away from the harbor. We can then find our way into the countryside.”
“It’ll be dark!”
“It’s going to get a lot darker, I fear.”
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.