A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  “I was going to kill him, but I’ve been having second thoughts about that.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I thought perhaps it might be better to take him back to Blavek for trial.”

  “No!” shrieks Payne, who knows all too well what reception would await him there.

  “I thought you didn’t want me to kill you,” she says. “That’s the only other option.”

  “I don’t, but if you take me back to Blavek I’ll be tried by the barons. I’d rather die quickly here.”

  “I’m glad that you’ve made my choice so easy,” she replies, “though I never promised that you’ll die quickly.”

  Payne swallows, but she can see him visibly steel himself, which surprises her a little. He raises his weapon and is even able to hold it fairly steady now that he thinks he knows what his fate is going to be.

  “I won’t make it that easy for you, Princess,” he manages to say.

  She lunges at him and is startled at how neatly he parries her thrust. She thrusts again and is again parried, this time with a more confident blow that makes her hand sting. There are a few more cautious feints and she can see her adversary’s confidence growing. She takes a deep breath and enters into the battle with concentrated seriousness.

  Payne is almost a full head shorter than the princess, but is powerful, athletic and frighteningly fast. His body is as strong and resilient as though it had been woven of piano wire. Bronwyn cannot imagine why; the man is a dedicated hedonist who has never in his life exerted himself more than absolutely necessary. She has to work harder than she expected to maintain her offensive advantage, though she can feel her lead gradually slipping away. Nor has she just how tired and ill-used she is; she had been operating on adrenaline but now her strength and concentration are waning far too quickly. She had been on horseback almost continuously for more than ten days, and can scarcely remember eating in all that time. The increasing anxiety and anticipation of this meeting had at first exhilarated and then drained her. Payne, however, seems to be shedding his fear in direct proportion to her declining abilities.

  The swordfight ranges over the length and breadth of the great hall, the blows ringing until the overlapping echoes fill the chamber with a continuous tintinnabulation. Bronwyn attacks him as though she were wielding an axe, or perhaps a scythe with Payne representing a stubborn thatch of undergrowth, and silvery sparks explode from every blow. More and more often Payne is able to parry a thrust that fifteen minutes before might have unzipped him like a shrimp being deveined, and more and more often Bronwyn feels a cold brush of air in the wake of a passing blade, and increasingly often a stinging cut somewhere on her body. Enough of these manage to draw blood that soon her blouse is as spotted as a clumsy housepainter’s.

  Finally, she parries a sudden lunge, misses clumsily and feels the edge of Payne’s blade slide along her ribs immediately beneath her right breast, just opposite the wound given to her by Praxx. The cloth drops away, sliced as though by a razor, and she can feel the sudden blood warmly oozing across her waist and stomach.

  “Princess!” she hears Rykkla cry. Bronwyn grimly ignores her, knowing that her friend would not intrude, but in spite of the renewed focus given to her by the sharp pain, Lord Roelt’s attacks become harder to fend off and she gradually, inexorably loses her original advantage and shakily takes on the defensive.

  Perspiration pours down her face, plastering her hair in curving rivulets the color of dried blood. The salty fluid stings her wounds and she can feel herself growing stiff from the fresh wound on her ribs combined with the barely-healed one Praxx had given her, which has now painfully reopened. She begins to wish that Rykkla would do something, but cannot spare enough breath to call out, and the bloodthirsty, irresponsible reptile buried deep within ber brain still irrationally hopes to yet wet its hands with Payne Roelt’s blood.

  Just then the floor begins to rock beneath her feet like the deck ofaship, throwing the combatants apart. At first she thinks she is swooning, and begins to panic at the loss of control, but she sees that Payne has also been thrown off balance. The floor between them is bulging upwards with cracks opening between the flagstones wide enough to slip a hand into. Steam and smoke puff from them. Without stopping to wonder at what is happening, she presses this slight advantage and for a few seconds beats the erstwhile chamberlain back along the floor, hacking at him as though she is a sailor flensing a whale. A kind of berserk fury gradually replaces the cold, controlled purposefulness of her original attack. To the reptile, Payne is little more than all of Bronwyn’s misery made incarnate: the destruction of her country, the death and torture of her friends, and the physical and mental pain of every category she has been forced to experience. She chops at him with furious two-handed blows as though each individual body part represents some particular injury to her: his head for Baron Milnikov’s, that’d be fair enough; fingers and toes for the gypsies; an arm for trying to kill her in the mountains; the other at the elbow for blowing up her bedroom; the rest of the arm just for hell of it; a disembowelment for Cousin Piers and his family and with every addition to the catalog she can feel her anger becoming ever more overpowering; fresh adrenaline pours her system like resin into the boiler of a steam engine.

  She has forgotten her resolution to turn the chamberlain over the barons, her bloodthirsty reptile driver deciding that she can just as easily and satisfactorily do the job herself. Payne seems to have come to a similarly fatalistic decision himself; his defense becomes increasingly mechanical, his strength proving at last no match for the ill-fed, sleepless, physically abused girl who is instead fired by a limitless reservoir of raw and righteous anger, which supercharged inspiration he cannot match. Payne is forced backwards, clumsily scuttling on his haunches, unable to gain the fraction of a second he needs to rise, as the princess swings her heavy saber at him like a woodsman hacking down a tree.

  The chamberlain’s blade goes spinning from his stinging hand; it flashes like a semaphore as it rotates, landing point-first in a crevice between two flagstones, narrowly and probably unfortunately missing the body of the unconscious king.

  Bronwyn presses the point of her saber into the hollow of Roelt’s throat. She is gasping for breath like an asthmatic, blind from tears, sweat and the sodden hair that crazes her. The blood-red zigzags that streak her face make her skull look like a shattered egg. Half of her breeches are black with the blood that Praxx has spilled, the other half a glossily wet mass of fresh crimson. Her blouse has been cut to ribbons by the the razor-edged weapons; it hangs from her shoulders in festoons and the skin revealed is criss-crossed by seeping welts.

  She is deciding what to do with Payne Roelt when once again the floor of the hall surges as though the castle has just taken a deep, anticipatory breath. There is a tense pause, then the keep shudders like a wet dog; cracks zigzag in the floor from one end of the hall to the other, with a sound like shattering china. Through it all, Bronwyn does not allow her blade to waver more than a fraction of an inch. “Princess!” she hears a voice cry. Gyven has emerged from the doorway that leads to the dungeons. Billows of oily smoke roll around him while beneath her feet comes a visceral, constipated grumbling.

  “Over here!” she manages to gasp.

  “Rykkla!” he shouts, instantly comprehending the situation. “Find something to tie him up with. Hurry! We have to get out of here!”

  “What’s going on?” Bronwyn asks.

  “I can’t explain now, but we’re in great danger. We have only minutes to get away.”

  He rolls Payne over and, grasping him from behind by his upper arms, lifts the small man from the floor as easily as he would a child. Rykkla returns with a dozen feet of cord she has pulled from a curtain. Gyven holds the prisoner as firmly as a set of iron shackles while the circus girl and the princess tie Payne so securely that he can scarcely breathe. Watching his fingertips grow blue with bloodlessness, Bronwyn has a secret, hopeful anticipation of gangrene.

&nbs
p; Gyven throws Payne over his shoulder like a sack of grain and, without looking to see if he is being followed, runs from the quaking hall, Bronwyn and Rykkla close at his heels. Thud is outside, surrounded by bodies.

  “The king is just inside the door!” shouts Gyven. “Get him quickly and follow us!”

  Without a word, the big man hurries through the broad doorway, appearing a moment later with the body of Ferenc under one arm.

  “What about these guys?” he asks, gesturing toward the Guards.

  “The hell with them,” replies Bronwyn.

  “Quickly!” cries Gyven, whose exhortation is nowhere as encouraging as the enormous blocks of stone that are now crashing around them, breaking into polygonal fragments and splinters, shaken from the highest ramparts of the keep that is now quivering like an aspic.

  Bronwyn runs as far as she can, but cannot even get as far as the main gate of the castle before exhaustion and the constricting pain in her sides cripple her. She falls to her knees, cramped and gasping. She feels Thud Mollockle scoop her up like a puppy, nestling her within the crook of his great arm.

  The next few minutes are a red haze, and she is not again fully aware until she feels the shock of cold water splashing against her face. She is again lying beside the spring that bubbles next to the hut and Gyven and Rykkla are pouring its icy water over her, washing away as much of the wet and crusted blood as they can. They have pulled what little remains of her blouse from her, horrified at the wounds revealed. Gyven has torn Rykkla’s petticoat into strips and the girl is preparing to bind the princess’ wounds. There is the distant sound of thunder; a continuous rumble like a waterfall or heavy surf.

  “What’s happening?” Bronwyn asks, raising herself against her nurses’ protests. Half a mile away an almost solid column of livid smoke boils into the air, with the force and violence of the discharge of a steam engine. The castle is no longer visible. In its place is a surging, fountaining orange flame. Only the ruins of the outside wall remain, and as she watches even this collapses, sinking into the chaotic, churning mass of liquid fire, the incandescent surface covered with a black crust of slag like a scab cracking and revealing the raw wound beneath.

  The lake of molten rock expands visibly, the ground at the perimeter crumbles with puffs of steam and brief yellow flashes as trees and bushes ignite instantaneously.

  “Gyven, what’s happening?” she repeats.

  “It’s the Kobolds.”

  “What?” she says, not comprehending.

  “The Kobolds.”

  “Is that where you went? You went to see the Kobolds? How’d you know they’d be there?”

  “That doesn’t matter at the moment. Don’t you remember their occupation? They’re refiners.”

  “I remember. It is stupid. They dug up ore, refined it and then put it back again. It didn’t make much sense.”

  “Well, I won’t try to explain it, and the reasons really don’t matter at the moment. But what’s important is that the Kobolds weren’t satisfied with simply refining something only once. After a number of years they would reexcavate the refined ore and refine it once again. And then they would do it a third time. Over the centuries there accumulated pockets of metals and minerals that have been refined ten, fifteen or twenty times, maybe even hundreds of times. The level of purity and concentration increased with each refinement, yet is never quite perfect enough to satisfy the Kobolds, who were, after all, on a mission from Musrum.

  “A hundred or more years ago, the Kobolds discovered that in certain rocks there are trace amounts of a metal they’d not seen before. After a few decades, they’d accumulated enough to appreciate some of its unusual characteristics: a silvery metal of extraordinary denseness, it outweighed an equal amount of lead, and it always felt warm to the touch. So the Kobolds kept refining more of the metal from the raw ore and rerefining the metal that they had. And with every increase in purification and concentration the more pronounced became the metal’s idiosyncrasies. The large amount that had been stored away was producing a prodigious quantity of heat and glowed with a bluish phosphorescence. The Kobolds were amazed and disturbed by the discovery that one did not have to touch or even be very near the metal for it to burn terribly. And once burned, the lesions never seemed to heal.

  “It was decided, then, to consolidate the three or four seperate hoards of the metal, so that it could be safely isolated from the main Kobold communities. The cavern that was chosen for the repository happened to be located directly beneath Strabane. It is the purest coincidence. The last load of the metal was delivered, as it happened, just this very morning.”

  “So?”

  “Well, no one could have predicted it, but there seems to be some sort of . . . well, critical mass, I suppose you could call it, beyond which the heat produced by the metal increases beyond all control.”

  “You mean that the Kobolds have accidentally melted Strabane?”

  “They do feel terrible about it.”

  The arrow marks the original location of Strabane Castle.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FINAL WORDS

  The four friends and their two prisoners leave the next day for Blavek, leaving behind a vast, circular basin filled with a scabby lake of heaving, heavily swirling lava; a cauldron into which is stirred a castle and a treasure as its most savory ingredients. Bronwyn does not suspect it, but the nascent volcano eventually proves to be instrumental in the recovery of Tamlaght’s economy. Although the loss of Payne’s loot should have been tragic, the final, irreversible, irresistible blow to the impoverished nation, since most of the money and treasure he had accumulated had belonged to the people and the state, or the Church which had gotten it from the people in the first place, the creation of the benign volcano ultimately more than made up for that. It eventually became one of the most popular tourist attractions in the northern hemisphere, once Tamlaght reluctantly abandoned its xenophobic isolationism, and within half a dozen years generated many times the amount of money that had been originally melted down, mixed and stirred into the amorphous magma. Several rustic hotels grew up nearby, as well as a small resort community. Blavek benefitted, too, by being the nearest seaport and large city. Its tawdry hotels were refurbished to suit the tastes of its Continental visitors and its restaurants vied for the trade of more sophisticated palates. Eventually, the natural geothermal area in the southeast is also opened to the public by enterprising entrepreneurs who established regular coach service between their resorts and the capital, providing unwelcome but useful competition with the Strabane caldera. The abbey of St. Woncible is rebuilt. There is talk of a bridge across the Strait.

  This is all, however, anticipatory.

  Ferenc had recovered soon after arriving at the hut, apparently none the worse for his concussion, though it is difficult to tell, all things considered. Payne, however, is in much worse condition. Not physically, he had suffered no serious wounds in his fight with the princess, and except for some loss of feeling in his extremities suffered no permanent injury in his capture. The sight of Strabane sinking into the ground like a foundering ship, however, has disconnected something in his already tenuously wired brain. He stares at the crumbling castle with bulging eyes and slack lips, an expression that remains more or less frozen. All the way back to Blavek he keeps his face turned toward the opposite direction, and so painful does this tortured posture look that even Bronwyn finally relents and allows her prisoner to be placed backwards on the horse. All the while he is muttering to himself in what sounds like a kind of droning chant. Bronwyn feels a kind of horror when after several days she realizes that he has been counting. “ . . . thirteen million three hundred and twelve thirteen million three hundred and thirteen thirteen million three hundred and fourteen . . . “ is the total that he had achieved when the princess finally overhears his words. He continues the monotonous ritual for the full two weeks of the journey.

  There are only the two animals for the first several days and with the ex
ception of Payne, who is never allowed to be untied, and Thud (out of kindness for the horses), turns are taken riding. Farms are eventually reached where extra animals are commandeered. At the first of these, Bronwyn, Thud, Rykkla and Gyven obtain their first substantial meal in weeks. Bronwyn allows the kindly wife of the farmer to tend her wounds, some of which have become inflamed and ugly-looking. Fortunately, none of the cuts had penetrated through the muscle, the most painful are those that had nicked her ribs. She gratefully abandons the remnants of her uniform (she had been wearing Gyven’s shirt since leaving the castle), accepting clothing from the family, who have a son more or less Bronwyn’s size. Outfitted in simple, clean homespun trousers tucked into her high boots, shirt and jacket, and broad-brimmed felt hat, a well fed, neatly bandaged Bronwyn feels fit and confident, anxious to complete this last leg of her inordinately and unexpectedly long journey.

  Gyven rides at her side, tall and brown, his long black hair tied in a looping queue at his neck. His blousy shirt billows in tbe wind like a sail and his rough-hewn profile cuts the air like the prow of a ship. He looks like a dime-novel hero.

  Payne Roelt rides behind him, tied to the back of Gyven’s saddle, still counting, always counting.

  Rykkla has her own horse, following the princess’, and Thud strides behind them all, negligently carrying the king like a satchel, his easy stroll effortlessly keeping pace.

  Gyven turns to the princess and asks in his leisurely, precise accent, “Are you happy now that it’s all over?”

  She doesn’t answer for a moment, deciding how honestly she can or will reply. “I really don’t know. Maybe not. I don’t know. Nothing really seems to be over. It all seems so, so anticlimactic, somehow. I suppose I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do, but I just can’t make it seem as important as I thinks it would be. I just feel tired; I want to get it all over with and get on with things.”