A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  Praxx cares not a whit for the treasures of Tamlaght; the only treasure he can see is Tamlaght itself. Soon Payne will be gone, retired to the retreat he has built on the Isle of Langerhans, where he will presumably spend the remainder of his days counting his money. The king is of no consequence; a trifle. In the coming chaos he will simply . . .disappear and, Praxx suspects cynically, never be missed. The only effective military force is the Guards, and they are under his control; to be accurate, not military in the usual sense. They are specialists: a band of carefully selected sociopaths who will be extraordinarily and enthusiastically effective in controlling the civilian population.

  The only difficulty Praxx can see is in finding a suitable head for the new government. He does not consider for a moment setting himself on the empty throne. As has been pointed out elsewhere, General Praxx’s ambitions are moderate and self-interested. He would be content with being one step down from the apex of the pyramid. He wants to exercise power, not represent it.

  For a brief, unlikely moment, the thought crosses his startled mind that perhaps the princess might consent to take her brother’s place. What an extraordinary idea. Yet, he considers before dismissing the notion, why not? As far as he knows, her only motive for all of her recent behavior is revenge upon Payne Roelt, whom he knows she loathes almost as much as Roelt does her. With the chamberlain gone and unlikely ever again to appear, and with the king . . . deposed . . . she would have everything she has been campaigning for these last two years. Why not? he repeats to himself, trying to remember anything specific about the princess’ personality and then realizing that she has always been something of a nonentity to him.

  As the general came into the sunlit plaza, the confusion strikes him like a physical blow. Scores, probably hundreds, of carts, wagons and vans are crowded willy-nilly into the square. They all seem to be wanting to go in as many different directions as there are vehicles, with the result that the entire mass circulates ponderously and randomly like a pot of boiling beans, but ultimately was going nowhere. Tempers have become short, if nonexistent, in the heat, which reflects from the flagstones in palpable, visible waves. Drivers scream and curse at their horses, their assistants, the Guards, each other and Musrum; their whips crack at the flanks of steaming, foaming horses, as well as their fellow teamsters. There are fistfights; those that the Guards can reach are being broken up by freely used truncheons. There are half a dozen dead or dying horses. There are a dozen overturned wagons.

  And all the while an endless chain of Guards are carrying bags and chests from the palace and depositing them onto a mound that only grows higher and higher.

  Praxx, who considers disorder second only to a rectal itch as an undesirable, has to forcibly prevent himself from issuing the orders needed to untangle the mess. He has to remind himself that he really has no particularly good reason for making Payne’s escape any easier. He finds one of his Guard officers, a harried-looking man in a disheveled uniform.

  “How are things going, Captain?”

  “You can see for yourself, sir. There’s no organization at all: none of the civilian drivers will take our orders. Each one wants to pick up his load and be on his way. There’s no cooperation at all! And I hesitate to use force, sir.”

  “You’re doing fine,” says the general to the surprised Guard. “Carry on.”

  Praxx makes his way around the periphery of the plaza to his office, which is on the opposite side of the island-bridge from the palace proper. There he finds waiting for him the information that he had more than half expected to hear: confirmation that Princess Bronwyn is indeed at the head of the army she had raised in Lesser Piotr. There is no question in his mind what her goals are, nor does he question that the stubborn girl will not stop until she has achieved them. Her army is disturbingly close, less than half the distance that separates Whuttley from Blavek. It would never have gotten this close had things been different; if it had been up to him, it would never have left the coast where it landed. But Payne had gathered the Guards around himself like a protective shield, a barrier of men more than a hundred deep.

  It doesn’t matter much to Praxx whether he obeys the chamberlain’s orders or not, his ultimate goal, he has decided, is best reached with the maximum amount of chaos. Following Payne’s wishes will accomplish that as well as any alternative might, and there are one or two other advantages: it will be as well for Payne to think the general still loyal to his interests, at least as long as the chamberlain is in the country; and while he still entertains the possibilities of offering the throne to Bronwyn, that contains risks, and life might be a little less complicated if she were to die in the storming of the capital. There is as good a chance of that happening as of anything else; if she survives, then he would see what there would be to see.

  There is little chance that the princess’ force would attempt to attack the city from the south, the Moltus is unbridged and is too broad and deep to ford. Any attack will necessarily come from the north, across the bridges where the river is narrowest, where the bulk of the city insulates the palace. It would be easy to defend the bridges, and Blavek proper can be saturated with the Guards that Payne has gathered around himself. If the princess’ forces manage to get into the capital, the ensuing no doubt prolonged battle would complete the destruction of the city, and when Blavek finally collapses so too would Tamlaght, like a great bull struck to the heart.

  Praxx, issuing the appropriate orders, can’t see any way in which he can lose.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  UNIONS AND REUNIONS

  The evening of the next day will see Bronwyn’s expeditionary force at the walls of Blavek. On this penultimate evening it has reached the banks of the Moltus, perhaps ten miles southeast of the city, where the river is about three-eighths of a mile wide . . . a broad, pellucid expanse of water that is like a steel cuirass protecting the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the capital.

  It is the first body of water of any size that has been encountered since leaving the coast, and the enthusiasm of the dry, dusty soldiers at its appearance is tolerated by the officers whose rank and dignity force them to suffer and be content with enjoying the aquatic sports by proxy and with clenched teeth. A tin tub filled with tepid and silty river water is an inadequate substitute rendered necessary if not tolerable by their exalted rank, which occasionally does not have all the privileges one might expect.

  Bronwyn feels no such compunctions, however, other than a repugnance to bathing with the men. She finds a quiet cove downstrearn where the slow current has carved a deep crescent into the high bank. An enormous oak has had its underpinnings cut away by the eroding water and collapsed into the cove, its roots splayed over the bank like the dendrites of a neuron, its length sloping gently until its further end enters the water. The stubs of its limbs are festooned with grey mats of dried grass left behind the last time the river had been at flood.

  The atmosphere is a formless, colorless haze, the sun a magenta disk still three hand’s-spans high in the midsummer sky, yet she can look directly at it without discomfort. Its limb is as sharp as though it was a disk of red-hot sheet metal. She can see two pairs of small, dark blemishes on its surface.

  She removes her boots and uniform, watching with disgust the clouds of yellow dust that puff from it with almost every movement, and after shaking it thoroughly hangs it neatly over a dry, protruding root. She gingerly lets herself down the crumbling, sandy bank to where a few pebbles separate her from the water. Carefully, barefoot, mindful of sharp stones or invisible holes, she wades into the river. The water is not terribly cool, not much less than blood temperature, in fact, but it feels incredibly soothing, like a smooth, scented syrup. She lowers herself into the river, stretching out her inordinately long legs, noticing the pale bifurcation within the green water glowing like a noctilucent cloud. They blur as though they are blending with the dark fluid and she wondered briefly why she does not dissolve if it were in fact true that the human body is ninety pe
rcent water. Or perhaps, if conditions are right, she would. She thinks she can feel it happening now, as the blood-warm water slowly disintegrates the distinction between Bronwyn and the river. She leans backwards, letting the river support her, making no particular effort to be bouyant, allowing only her face to remain above water. She moves her arms and legs in lazy figure-eights, enjoying the silky feel of the liquid as it flows around and over them. It is one of the all too rare times when she is consciously aware of her body as a gestalt. The water smells fresh, earthy and a little fishy. When it splashes on her mouth, it tastes clear and sweet.

  She feels curiously unexcited now that the goal she has been working so hard to achieve is finally within sight. There seems to be little that can stop her now; no matter how much opposition they might meet in the city, the days of Payne and her brother are certainly numbered, and probably in single digits. But where she should be feeling elation, she feels only a vague sense of anticlimax. Perhaps because the end seems so foregone a conclusion that its execution appears to be an almost mechanical operation, a matter of attending to a few necessary details. She cannot even quite put her finger on the point of transition after which her quest had been fulfilled. Perhaps it is that very lack of singularity that is unfulfilling. But there is a little more to it than that; things are perhaps somewhat more subtle, as they so often are. Stirred in with and abetting the sense of anticlimax is the sensation that the business ahead is something that she merely wants to get over with as quickly and neatly as possible. In other, and perhaps more honest, words, Bronwyn has discovered that she is losing interest in the quest that has taken her so far and for so long a journey.

  The distraction, the replacement focus, is Gyven, of course.

  She sighs, sinking beneath the glass-green surface, her sigh converting to a stream of lazy bubbles. She opens her eyes, but all that is visible is a luminous chartreuse fog that reduces even the nearest parts of her own body to little more than vague shadows. She holds her breath and is startled, soothed and a little frightened, oddly, by the completeness of the silence.

  She lets herself drift back to the surface and, just as her face reenters the atmosphere, she feels something grasp her left ankle. She releases a startled squawk, thrashing and kicking with surprise and fright. When she had been little more than seven or eight years old she had gotten a leg entangled in weeds while swimming in a pond on her cousin Piers Monzon’s estate. She had been diving below the surface and, while the pond is only a few feet deep, the weeds kept her face beneath the surface. It was for less than half a dozen seconds, though it seemed like forever to the child, and then her wild kicks freed her leg and she popped into the air crying and screaming in combined panic and relief. She has never since felt wholly comfortable around water, and has never cared much for swimming in places where she is uncertain about what lay beneath the surface.

  She spins around and finds her face less than six inches from Gyven’s. His head, visible only from the chin up, looks like a granite island freshly raised from the seafloor by some volcanic upheaval.

  “Did I frighten you?” he asks. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” she lies. “You just startled me. I thought I is alone.”

  “I’ll leave.”

  “No! I mean, no . . . it’s not necessary.”

  “Good. You don’t mind that I’m here?”

  “I’m glad that you came. I was thinking of you. That is, I’ve been thinking of you.” Bronwyn tries to cover her confusion, not at all sure why she feels so clumsy and reticent, or, for that matter, confused. She feels an old stirring of the resentment and annoyance that Gyven used to be able to create, sometimes by saying little more than a single word. Yet now this feeling is tempered, diluted . . . or perhaps transmuted.

  “Why’ve I seen so little of you since we left Whuttley?” she asks.

  “I’m sorry. I thought that it was best.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t join your army as anything other than an ordinary soldier . . . it wouldn’t have seemed right . . .” He appears to be, for the first time since she has known him, at a loss for words. With uncharacteristic kindness, or perhaps only inspired by curiosity, she decides to help him.

  “You didn’t want to appear favored?”

  “Yes. Something like that. That is part of it, at least.”

  “And the rest?”

  Gyven struggles for a reply, though it is unnecessary since Bronwyn knows what it is, or at least hopes so. She places her arms over his shoulders and kisses him full on the lips. They feel cool and firm and she can feel the hard undulations of his teeth behind them. A terrible moment passes during which the princess begins to believe that perhaps she may have been horribly mistaken, and then Gyven grasps her head between his long-fingered hands, entangling her hair (which when wet is as maroon as old blood) in his fingers, and pulls her face to his. He tastes like salt and silver. She feels herself melt into him as though they are two warm bricks of butter, two sketches in clay that a dissatisfied sculptor has decided to merge into a superior and larger completeness. She wraps her long legs around his torso and they sink to the graveled bottom, transparent curtains of chlorine light spinning around them like the ribbons of a Maypole. Then they burst to the surface and, laughing and choking, fall into the shallower water close to the pebbly shore. There, awash in the blood-warm placental liquid, her hair spread around her face like some radiant coral or anemone, her long body as sleek and supple as an eel, like the tendrils of graceful seagrass, like the eloquent grace of the octopus, with the man above her like a great dark cloud eclipsing the sky and the sun, his eyes like thunder and lightning, his craggy body like some primordial planet in collision with her own, she allows him, urges him, to enter her.

  For Musrum’s sake, Bronwyn manages to think, with not a little astonishment, this is Gyven, of all people! And will I never know why? And why, for that matter, do I feel that I need to know why? Because I once hated and loathed him, looked on him with contempt and resentment? Can hate and love be opposite sides of the same circle? Did I have to hate him first, as a kind of catharsis, a purging, a cleansing? But then, what part of me knows all along that I wanted him? and, again, why why?

  And then, At last!

  And then, with no less surprise, This is altogether different than it was with Mathias! This is a lot more like what I read about in those little brown books I used to steal from the guardrooms . . .

  Eventually, as it always must, Bronwyn’s pragmatism shoulders its way past all of her quivering sentimentality, elbows past the leering, exhausted, satiated reptile of her primitive brain, and takes a single appalled, objective look at what is going on and immediately sets about, as it must, spoiling things.

  She becomes uncomfortably aware that she is wet and chilly. There are rocks and things poking into her back, with Gyven’s pressing weight now becoming a burden, and there is now the nagging thought that this is river water that she has been making love in, Moltus River water, for heaven’s sake. When you have sex in water, does it get pumped up into you? she wonders. She hopes to Musrum it doesn’t.

  It is getting chillier and clammier and now, worse, she is feeling a little silly, she begins to worry about someone coming along and discovering them. She doesn’t know how she would handle that, particularly if it were one of her soldiers (or, Musrum forbid! Mathias).

  Then, feeling particularly inspired by its success so far, her demon of pragmatism deals her an anxious, brilliant blow by asking this question: is her ineffable attraction to Gyven, is this recent act of carnality and self-indulgence, only a surrender to her basest animal instincts? Is there indeed a fundamental difference between her attraction for Mathias on one hand and Gyven on the other, and is this difference more than merely a matter of degree, of intensity? Is it really, truly Mathias whom she loves? And is this true, intellectual, ideal love simply being overwhelmed by the base, physical, hormonal attraction to Gyven, to which she has succumbed like a house of car
ds in the path of a locomotive? She doesn’t know but struggles in confusion against these perfidious suggestions. There has to be more to what she feels for Gyven, there must be to account for everything she feels; she just doesn’t know what that can be.

  She turns her head toward the great craggy one that hovers over her, a black silhouette as sharp-edged as a souvenir paper cutout, to tell Gyven that they must get dressed and rejoin the army immediately. But those grey eyes glow from the shadowy face like moons, like aurorae fizzing with electricity, like radium, like will-o’-the-wisps in a marsh enameled witb midnight, and she feels herself dissolving in them like a spoonful of effervescent salts.

  The horns and bells and whistles arouse them, although that verb may be something less than appropriate. It is a clamorous, joyous sound that Bronwyn, enraptured, romanticized, at first thinks is inside her own head, but the alternate princess has not been wholly stupefied and argues impatiently against such a picturesque and implausible sentimentality.

  The sounds echoing from across the water make the princess think that a carnival has arrived, or that the celebration of some obscure saint’s day is in progress. In any event she realizes, with a little disappointment, that the sounds are distinctly external. She hastily scrambles into her clothing, her body still dripping. Gyven follows suit. When they climb the bank and look out at the river, it is full of lights. Beneath the lights are boats. Scores of boats. In the iron-colored twilight it seems to Bronwyn that every boat and ship in the world is steaming, sailing or being paddled up and down the Moltus, their individual courses all appearing to intersect at that point on the bank near where her own army is encamped. Her astonished men are scrambling from the water as quickly as they can, their mood absolutely ruined.