A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  A broad area of pavement surrounding the descending pyre is voluntarily evacuated as it continues to sink as evenly as though it were mounted on screw jacks or an elevator. A square crater appears in the flagstones immediately beneath the pyramid, which becomes visible as the sloping sides of the pyre descend. As the struggling figure of the intended victim lowers to eye level, it can be seen that he has freed himself of most of the restraining ropes. As the peak falls below street level, Thud throws aside the last of the ropes.

  All that remains of the pyre is a neat square crater in the middle of the pavement, pouring forth a column of black smoke, licked through with dark red flames, as though a volcano has just gone through a demonstration of reverse evolution.

  Absolutely nothing happens for several minutes and the crowd, who has been silently expecting a horde of the Weedking’s minions to pour over the edge of the crater, becomes restless. The vast rectilinear hole continues to silently smoke, but otherwise there is a distinct sense of anticlimax. After an additional few minutes, for caution’s sake, a number of spectators take the first few tentative steps toward the smoldering cavity. Perhaps, a few of them think, the weight of the pyre, combined with its heat, has caused a collapse of some ancient system of sewers. Since nothing further has occurred, these brave souls are followed by others until eventually the entire crowd moves toward the vanished funeral pyre.

  They are premature.

  Not more than a dozen yards separates the advancing mob from the sheer lip when twenty or thirty enonmous, naked creatures suddenly leap from the pit, like a stampede of hairless, albino buffalo. Ranging in size from seven to nine feet in height and bulking proportionally, the monsters brandish shovels and pickaxes, regarding with beady eyes the frozen spectators, as gardeners might look upon an infestation of weevils. If the crowd has any one, momentary consolation it is that they had been perfectly correct in condemning the creature called Thud, for he is assuredly of the same species as these horrible demons. But this realization, if it occurred at all, must have been virtually instantaneous, for scarcely a second passes between the materialization of the monsters and the collapse of the mob into an abjectly panicked retreat. The three members of the original Tribunal have only moments of consciousness remaining before they suffer simultaneous embolisms.

  Meanwhile, beneath the streets of the city, Thud meets his countrymen for the second time in his life. He had first been hustled quickly away from the sunken pyre, through a labyrinth of tunnels: sewers, drainage pipes, ancient and forgotten commercial passages, interconnected basements and subbasements, and so forth, until he lost all orientation. Once there is little danger of successful pursuit (his rescuers can not have known yet that the disappointed ground dwellers have little immediate intention of looking into what lay within the crater), Thud is confronted by one of the Kobolds who had been leading him.

  “Musrum!” the Kobold says, with no preamble, “King Slagelse is correct: living on the surface is a terrible thing for a Kobold to do. Have a beer?”

  “Let me introduce ourselves,” says a second Kobold, a little more politely and with a reproachful glance at his comrade. “My name is Snideler and this is Hicksler. We presume you are Thud?”

  “Sure,” replies Thud. They all shake hands with one another. They are all three as alike as peas in a pod, though very much larger, of course. Thud is still dressed in his prison outfit, a kind of shapeless grey tent with black stripes, while the two Kobolds are nude except for their customary brief asbestos breechcloths. Thud thinks it is very pleasant to visit with people his own size, though this is an assessment with which the others do not entirely concur.

  “Just look,” continues the Kobold named Hicksler. “The outside life has withered him to practically a mere wisp. I think he needs a beer.”

  “Come now, you know he can not help it.”

  “It is not the way I heard it. Musrum! Look at the color he has turned!”

  “Ignore him, please, Thud,” says Snideler. “Would you like a beer?”

  “Sure!”

  “We brought along a supply of things we thought you might have missed. Hicksler, bring Thud a beer, will you?”

  “He is so skinny,” mutters the other Kobold, before turning to pick up one of the enormous kegs that lay nearby.

  “You must have really missed this,” commented Snideler pleasantly, upturning a keg and draining it in a single swallow. “Been a long time since you have a good mushroom beer, I suppose?”

  “It certainly has,” agreed Thud, accurately to a fine degree, since he had never had one to his recollection.

  “Here you go,” says Hicksler, handing Thud one of the kegs, which contains twenty-five gallons if it contained a drop. “This will make a new Kobold out of you!”

  Thud opens his mouth wide, which is in effect as though the top of his head has hinged back, exposing a round, pink opening in the middle of his shoulders. He upturns the keg and drains its greenish contents into his mouth . . . an operation that looks for all the world like a hogshead being filled with a dipper. The other two join him with enough relish that it is more than evident that it is their own refreshment they had been interested in all along.

  “That is good!” Thud says, handing back the empty keg.

  “Let us have another then,” suggests Hicksler.

  “We had best be going. They will be expecting us.”

  “You brought up the beer, not me.”

  “It does not matter, Hicksler, let us now just hurry.”

  “You say it does not matter now, but wait until someone asks why we are so late and see what you say then.”

  Thud followed his rescuers through a seemingly endless series of tunnels, pipes and chambers until finally they reach a point where Snideler points to the roof and says, “We are here.”

  Thud looks up and sees a thin ring of light: an ill-fitting manhole cover at the top of a short vertical well with heavy iron rungs set in the curved stone wall.

  “Go on up,” says Hicksler. “They are waiting for you.”

  “Who?” asks Thud.

  “How am I supposed to know?” the Kobold replies, then adds with a shudder, “You would never catch me out there.”

  The well is none too wide at all for Thud’s vast bulk, though the fact that he is able to negotiate it at all might be seen as a confirmation of Hicksler’s conviction that Thud is less massive than a healthy Kobold should be. He lifts the iron disk at the top of the well with one hand and raises his head cautiously. He rotates like a periscope. The manhole is in the middle of a cobbled street, or alleyway, since it seems very narrow and dirty. In the order in which he catalogs what he sees, there is a dingy wall with painted-over windows and bricks covered with tattered posters and handbills; a long, narrow roadway, which seems to go on for miles due to his low-level perspective; the walls of the buildings opposite the first one, which seem to be identical in almost every detail, with the addition of battered, galvanized ashcans; and finally the opposite vista of the alleyway, which is in this direction mostly blocked from view by the four sturdy legs of a horse, the iron-tired wheels of a wagon and two more pairs of legs, these, however, evidently human. One pair is hidden by baggy, patched trousers and heavy work shoes. The other pair, however, are bare and brown and as shapely as though they had been turned on a lathe. When he looks up to see who the legs belong to there is a moment of mutual recognition:

  “Thud!” cries two voices simultaneously.

  “Busra!” says Thud. “Rykkla!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  HERE AND THERE

  Thud and his rescuers are several miles outside the city before he is allowed to protrude his head from the bundles and baggage that fill the floor of the little wagon. It reminds Rykkla of a pink egg sitting in its nest. When Thud speaks, it looks as though the egg are cracking and she half expected something to hatch from it.

  The trio had not been disturbed while leaving the city. Its officials were more concerned about what was disapp
earing into and appearing out of the ground than with gypsy wagons trundling from the city. Anything leaving the town was fine with them.

  The crater that the Kobolds had made in the city’s central square remained undisturbed for more than a year before the townspeople finally accepted it, since nothing further ever emerged from it. It eventually became half filled with stagnant little pools of greenish rainwater and the rubbish that blew or is thrown into it. There is considerable debate over whether it should be filled in and paved over. A small monument is erected at last, by public subscription, to commemorate the event. It is a simple, squat pedestal bearing a somewhat imaginative likeness of Thud. There was hope that the depression might serve to attract tourists to the town, and that might indeed have been the case have not subsequent events in Tamlaght provided irresistible competition. No one, it seemed, wished to travel the necessary hundreds of miles to simply visit an otherwise undistinguished city with a hole in the middle of its central plaza, even if it did boast a mediocre sculpture of a fat man.

  “Where are we?” asks Thud. It is the first time since his capture several weeks earlier that it has occurred to him to wonder where he might be. Perhaps the earlier hopelessness that had so depressed his thoughts is passing.

  “We just left Fezzoo,” replies Busra, glancing over his shoulder as he flicks the flanks of the pair of little mules that pull the wagon. The animals ignor him.

  “Who’s Fezzoo?”

  “You can come on out now, I think,” interjects Rykkla.

  “Fezzoo,” explains Busra, as Thud struggles to free himself of his friends’ belongings, threatening to overturn the little wagon in the process, “is the capitol of Fezzara.”

  “What’s Fezzara?”

  “Fezzara is north of Crotoy, and Crotoy, anticipating your next question, is the country that lies between us and Tamlaght.”

  “Blavek’s in Tamlaght, isn’t it?”

  “It is indeed, my friend.”

  “Are we going there?”

  “It’s as good a place as any!” Busra replies, though he sees no point in mentioning that Blavek lies more than twelve hundred miles away in a highly idealistic straight line, as well as through some of the most rugged topography in the islands. Nor that traveling there is not part of either his immediate or even future plans.

  “Do you think the princess might be there?”

  “Your Princess Bronwyn?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I wouldn’t know. That’s where she’s from, isn’t it? And isn’t that where she is trying to go?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then you might as well go as far in that direction with us as you can.”

  “All right.”

  Thud has made himself comfortable atop the big, canvas-bagged bundles, having moved things with corners and edges to the periphery of the wagon. He resembles not a little another big canvas bag himself, especially since he is still wearing the sackcloth robe he had been given for his fortunately interrupted immolation.

  The wagon is not very large and is covered by a dingy canvas cover supported by four iron semihoops. This is now rolled up at the sides so that Thud has a clear view of the landscape as well as a little ventilation. Busra and his niece sit on a plank that serves as the driver’s seat.

  Outside of Fezzoo the countryside is rustic to a wild and picturesque degree that would be delightful to tourists if Fezzara had any, but the narrow twisting tracks that wind round the craggy boulders and ford cascading streams cast something of a pall over whatever aesthetic attractions the scenery might have held for Busra as he coaxes his recalcitrant and resentful animals over and through rocks and ruts and water.

  Between Fezzoo and Flekke, the capital of Crotoy, the trio easily falls back into their old routine and earns more than enough money with the revived strong-man act to finance a certain degree of comfort: they can afford ferries when they are a convenience (which is a blessing in the fjord- and lake-slashed northern countries), comfortable inns at least once or twice a week, and good food and drink at those same inns and at taverns or good drink and the materials for making their own good food when camping out. There is always every day a little money left over so that an iron box that Busra keeps under the seat of the wagon gradually fills with the accumulating gold and silver.

  At every village and hamlet between the two capitals Thud and Rykkla do their act, twice every weekday and three times daily on the weekends, that is the advertised schedule; in truth they perform as often as they can get audiences to pay to watch. Busra himself takes progressively less part in the performances until eventually Rykkla and Thud alone are left to entertain. Instead, Busra devotes his time to what he likes to call “management,” which entails, in fact, far more time and labor than he had already been devoting as a performer. And it is mostly through his efforts at bill-posting (he would hire every child in a town at a poenig apiece and a free pass to distribute handbills, and half a dozen older ones to plaster every available vertical surface with posters); placing advertisements in newspapers, or seeing that reporters and editors receive passes so that some feat or imaginary story about Thud (for whom Busra has invented a history even more fantastic than the already incredible truth) would get a few inches of column space; acting as roustabout, ticket seller and ticket collector, master of ceremonies and bouncer; and he developed a tidily profitable business in the selling of refreshments (Rykkla-concocted lemonade, cookies and popcorn, and store-bought candies for the ladies and children; Busra-enhanced lemonade for the men) and souvenirs (cast-plaster figures of Thud, illustrated booklets purporting to impart the secrets of his great strength, photographs of Rykkla in her costume, which latter are indeed very popular).

  As summer approaches the weather becomes clement enough to preclude the erection of a tent, which is just as well since Busra and Rykkla have not yet been able to replace the big one they had lost in the fire. Instead, an encircling screen of canvas panels, painted with verve and imagination, if not accuracy, by Rykkla herself, serves to shield the performers from those who are impecunious, incurious or miserly. As their reputation spreads and proceeds them, these latter became fewer and fewer in number, in indirect proportion to the volume of precious metal in the iron box.

  There is always a moment after a show has begun when Busra can lean against one of the supporting poles, arms crossed over his massive chest, and admire the spectacle, which he never tires of watching. At night, the circular wall of spectacularly painted canvas (Rykkla works only in primary colors) ripples behind the heads of the crowded spectactors. Atop each supporting pole a flaring torch burns, and the wagon, which when unfolded acts as a stage, is also surrounded by a dozen torches and lanterns. The fluttering, flickering light imparts a sense of motion to an audience packed too tightly to itself actually move and even the painted figures seem to stir impatiently. Busra would begin the show by standing on the platform and announcing the upcoming performance in terms so gaudy, so purply effusive, so unlikely in their exaggeration that not one member of the audience fails to believe every word he spoke. Any restlessness, conversation or laughter is quickly replaced by a hush of breathless expectancy Busra gives a history of Thud that is more often than not at complete variance with the booklets he is to sell after the show because he enjoys making up a different story every time, even if he were to feel that any particular compulsion to tell the truth, which does not occur to him. Rykkla’s beauty inspires a poesy that, depending upon the sexual majority of the audience, can be either inspiring in its description of an almost angelic purity or leeringly suggestive.

  Having done his job of providing fuel for every possible expectancy, leaving his audience silent and agape in its anxiousness, he retires to his overlooking post.

  After an almost unbearable half minute of silence there suddenly comes the sound of music, tinny, scratchy and determinedly treble, but music nevertheless. This is a wonder in itself since there are no musicians present, and the marvelous Londeacan mechanic
al sound reproducer is not only hitherto unseen and unheard in these rural communities but altogether unheard-of. But before the audience can give another thought to the mystery of the music’s invisible source, the torches suddenly flare and in the dazzle of light there appears a slender figure that brings gasps from every man and elder boy, unabashed and audible if single, unsuccessfully repressed if married, and a sigh somewhere between admiration and envy from every woman and girl. Rykkla stands, feet together, arms raised over her head, so motionless that for a brief moment not a few members of the audience would think, with a pang of disappointment, that it is nothing but a statue or painting that has been unveiled. She wears only a glossy, sheer black leotard covered with infinitesimal iridescent scales that shimmer purply and greenly, like the sheen of a grackle’s wings. It exactly matches her sleek obsidian hair. The costume is cut very high on her hips so that her long legs look as though they originate in her armpits. The décolletage plummets in a broad swoop of honeyed skin and her breasts are nearly squeezed from their insubstantial confinement by her raised arms. At that moment, had the show ended there, many in the audience would have felt that they had gotten more than their money’s worth.

  The statue is motionless only for that mesmerizing moment; then with a graceful gesture, a swing of the slender arms, Rykkla wordlessly introduces her partner. It is a testament to the girl’s presence that Thud has managed to gain the platform unseen until that moment. However, as soon as her gesture swings every eye toward him, she is immediately, if temporarily, forgotten, which is certainly a testament in turn to Thud. Busra never fails to be amused by the ripple of movement the giant’s appearance invariably causes, as the audience instinctively and unconsciously draws back from the stage.Busra never tires, too, of watching his niece and their adopted friend as they go through their undeviating routine: Rykkla’s almost unearthly grace and beauty, and no little strength of her own, the sexuality she radiates as unabashedly and naturally as a blacksmith’s hearth radiates light and heat, a paradoxical sexuality that is intense because it is so pure and so perfect as to seem untouchable; Thud’s enormous strength, a power that is clearly inhuman, undoubtedly superhuman, and seemingly boundless, yet which never seems frightening, like a powerful machine in the hands of a skilled and benevolent operator. It seems to the uninitiated that the contrast between the girl and the giant would be an insurmountable impediment to success or even verisimilitude, that either the girl’s perfection would make the giant appear hopelessly slow, massive and clumsy, or that the giant would make the girl all but invisible. Yet, inexplicably neither effect occurs. Instead they complement one another as perfectly and naturally as fire and ice, sweet and sour or orange and purple. Certainly, without Rykkla, Thud would have still been impressive, but probably no more interesting to watch for an extended period than a pile driver. Without Thud, Rykkla would have been little more, ultimately, than just one more moderately talented gymnast, trapeze artist or aerialist; and perhaps she may have seemed just a little less beautiful without Thud’s contrast, although that is an ungallant supposition. Thud is neither speedy nor agile, and had the act been left entirely to him it would have been excruciatingly slow, no matter what marvels of strength he might demonstrate; Rykkla added life and action and busyness. She spins and whirls around his solidity like a satellite caught in the gravity of a primal and vasty planet. She coils around his banyan-like trunk like the sinuous boa, like the snake’s caressing tongue. Like a glossy rivulet of molten licorice, she pours down his shoulders and flanks and a quavering sigh of envy issues from the men watching. She allows Thud to juggle her like an Indian club, as effortlessly as a drum major’s baton; she seems to float weightlessly from hand to hand; she climbs to his shoulders and runs to the end of Thud’s outstretched arm, which remains as rigid as an I-beam as she dances and does handstands on the broad forearm; she jokes and sings clever jingles, filling her partner’s silence; she acts as his assistant, handing him the railroad spikes and horseshoes that he ties into knots for sale later as souvenirs; she lures perspiring and bug-eyed yokels from the audience to take part in comically suggestive routines to the immeasurable amusement of his friends and the volunteer’s almost immobilizing embarassment, not so much at the jokes and laughter made at his expense, but at the proximity of darksome Rykkla and the certainty that the rube’s lust is so transparent to the audience that he might as well be standing there pale and naked. For forty-five minutes at least twice every day, more often half a dozen times, the act is repeated. By the time the trio reaches Flekke, Busra feels ready to make a proposition. He broaches the subject as they eat their dinner.