A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess

by Ron Miller

  “Like what? Are you going to assume the throne now?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I guess I’d always taken it for granted that I would, if I thought about it at all. To be truthful, I never really thought very much beyond beating Payne and my brother. I haven’t decided what I’ll do now.”

  “Someone has to take the throne.”

  “You know, Gyven, I’ve been worrying about that. I know it’s my duty, and I know it’s expected of me, but can’t find it in me to want to. This’ll sound awful, I know, I don’t like myself for feeling this way, but I’ve realized that I just don’t care.”

  “Perhaps you’re only tired.”

  “Musrum knows that’s true, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I’ve thought back, and I think that I’ve been feeling this way for a long time.”

  “If you don’t take the throne, what will you do?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  * * * * *

  The journey to Blavek takes longer than that to Strabane: the pace is more leisurely and Bronywn, for one, is finding her anxiousness to return to the city eroding in indirect proportion to their increasing proximity. She takes every opportunity to call for rest stops, as often as she spies a shady knoll or they cross some cool, shadow-colored stream bubbling and slipping over the rounded rocks and pebbles of its bed. None of her companions seem to be in any more of a hurry than she is, and the diversions are accepted with enthusiasm and abandoned with reluctance.

  Finding a deep hole in a river downstream from an ancient, arched stone bridge they were crossing, they tie their horses by the roadside, in the shade of an enormous willow, and hike down to the water’s edge. There they shed their clothing and laze for an hour or two in the cool, swirling water. Bronwyn swims to the center of the circular basin and, holding her body vertically, motionless, allows herself to sink like a plumb bob. The water is as clear as glass and she is suspended, weightless, in a transparent sphere, itself surrounded by an impenetrable gloom, like a decorative paperweight. She feels like the center of a new universe, like the gravitational locus aound which might accrete a whole new world. The others hang like pendants from the quivering mirrored ceiling above her, their wan, green-tinted, headless bodies looking like planets obediently orbiting her; the shifting, reticulated light swirling dowly over their soft landscapes like weather patterns: storms, cyclones, squalls and gales.

  Later, they dry themselves by lying on the flat sun-baked rocks under an incandescent sun and the no less incandescent combined glare of Payne Roelt and Ferenc Tedeschiiy, both of whom had been left securely bound (but at least kindly placed in the shade on the bank). Is the former titillated by the sight of the two beautiful women? One tall, cinnamon-haired, with skin the color of clover honey, the other also tall, but with carbon-black hair and skin the color of wildflower honey? Is he disturbed by the sight of the princess he loathed, seeing her looking far healthier than he have ever hoped to see her? Or did perhaps the still-red wounds on her sides, arms and face provide some measure of compensation? Or did that distant haze over Payne’s eyes, which remained focussed upon a point a little beyond the long, sinuous, shimmering women, belie that apparent appreciation of them? Would a closer observer realize that the ex-chamberlain has, in effect if not fact, gone quite blind . . . though it is a color blindness, for instead of blackness he sees only flame-red and gold?

  Bronwyn lies back upon her rock and lets the sun wash over her like warm butter, like amber embedding a hapless insect, like mineral-laden waters replacing the cells of the future fossil with jasper and onyx. She falls asleep and dreams an odd and disturbing dream.

  In that dream Baron Sluys Milnikov comes to her looking, she thinks, very different than he had ever looked before. It is the same baron, of course, and she cannot understand what is so strangely different about him until she realizes that it is not he who has changed.

  They are in a vast and well-kept park of a rolling and determinedly rustic aspect. There is a glassy pond with perfectly placed lily pads, willows arching gothically and a pair of swans drifting with choreographic perfection. Nearby is a gazebo made of gnarly bark-covered branches and logs, and small benches also made of artistically looping bent wood. She is sitting on one of these now.

  The baron is tall and distinguished and very handsome. His moustachios tilt upwards like a pair of sharp clock hands indicating ten minutes past ten (or perhaps ten minutes before two), like a pair of black scissors threatening to truncate the prominent and aristocratic nose that juts forward like the prow of a torpedo ram, as though he were scenting something he can’t quite place. His neat little imperial looks more like a comma than an exclamation point. His sleek hair is combed straight back from his forehead, leaving grey wings over his temples, and his grey-green eyes twinkle with a humorous and absentminded glimmering. He is in the blood-red full dress uniform of the House of Milnikov and carries a polished scarlet-plumed helmet in the crook of his left arm. He seems immeasurably attractive and it is that perception that makes him seem so different to her.

  She sees herself reflected in the mirrored dome of the baron’s helmet, distorted like melting taffy. It is then that she realizes she is nude. The baron seems to take no notice and it seems perfectly right, and absolutely correct to Bronwyn, too.

  The baron makes a deep and elaborately formal bow.

  “My dearest princess,” he says, “may I have the honor of this dance?”

  She has not noticed it before, but there appears to have been a string quartet in the gazebo all along. They are playing the Broken Heart Waltz, one she seldom hears though it is a favorite. She stands and took the baron’s proferred hand.

  She had always felt herself something of a child in the baron’s presence before now, but now that she is in his arms, as they spin to the sad music that swirls around them, as though they are being stirred in a warm syrup, she sees that she is as tall as he. She looks into his face and sees something there that no child would ever have perceived.

  As they dances she plucks at his uniform and it falls away like dissolving tissue paper; the colorful pieces fluttering around them like the flakes of snow in a water-filled paperweight, like the gaudy feathers of a molting parrot, like the last leaf-filled winds of autumn. Beneath the uniform he is as nude as she. His body is long and lean and smooth rather than muscular, and the hair on his chest is grizzled. Yet she realizes that while the baron might be old enough to be her father, his age is a relative thing; he is by no means an old man. Or is the dream baron really a younger man?

  She presses herself against him, and while they circle slowly something like a swarm of fireflies swirls around the couple, what she thinks is the bright confetti of the baron’s uniform is not: it is a cloud of faeries. They arrange themselves in bright concentric rings, in shifting helices that twine and intertwine like colliding galaxies. Spikenard and his luminous wives dance down her arms like droplets of molten gemstones, liquid topaz, emerald, citrine, ruby, amethyst. The shifting, submarine light lends a translucency to the bodies of Bronwyn and the baron, so that they seem to shimmer from within like paper lanterns.

  “I loved you, my dear princess,” says the baron.

  “I know that; I love you, too,” she answers almost automatically, as she always has, not noticing the baron’s use of the past tense. She steps back from the baron, realizing with very little surprise, a dreamy acceptance, that she is now dressed in her full uniform, from riding boots to the stiff brocaded collar that props her stubborn chin erect. Her torso is encased in the bright, impermeable shell of a polished steel curaiss. She looks down at it and sees her warped reflection grimacing back at her.

  “You don’t understand, my dear. I more than loved you: I was in love with you.”

  “Oh, Baron, how could you? Why didn’t you ever tell me? How could I have known?”

  “I had to love you in silence. You know that.”

  “But you did tell me, didn’t you? You tried to tell
me anyway,” she says, with a sudden, bitter inspiration, “a hundred times. And I never noticed. I took everything you said and did for me for granted. As I always have,” she added bitterly, “with everyone.”

  “Seeing you happy was always enough,” the baron replies with a smile, and she knows that he really means what he says. But what is it he is saying? How can that have been enough? She herself would never have accepted such an immaterial token from anyone.

  The cloud of faeries swirls over his body like electrical sparks, encasing him in their phosphorescent orbits like some artful St. Elmo’s fire; he becomes a paper doll consumed by the flying sparks, a doll gift-wrapped in loops of incandescent wire, a doll cut from magicians’ flash paper, an erupting effigy in a pyrotechnic celebration.

  Love him! whispers a piccolo voice in her ear.

  “What?”

  Love him! comes the reply in her other ear. For a brief instant she sees the luminous, sardonic face of Spikenard hovering in front of her own, supported by the kaleidoscopic aurora of his wings.

  “I can’t!”

  He’ll be gone soon!

  “No!”

  Gone forever this time. Look! He’s going . . . going . . .

  The baron holds his hands out to her, bright with dancing beads of light, dripping sparks like jewels, his eyes like silver, like pearls, like lodestones. His long figure seem to diminish, seem to sublime, seem to recede, shrinking like a departing locomotive or ship, seeming to transmute from base elements to the quintessential, from the worldly to the ethereal, from here to there.

  “Oh, Baron! I’m sorry!” she cries, suddenly stretching her arms toward him. “I can’t . . . “

  She is too late; the baron is gone.

  Bronwyn awakes then, disturbed and puzzled by her dream; depressed and saddened as well. She tries to ascribe the dream and some of the strange mood that results to how much she misses the baron, but cannot explain why that seems so inadequate. Why, she argues with herself, did she feel so much guilt? The golden day, now brassy, is spoiled for her.

  Rykkla is still in the water, playing with her huge . . . friend. Bronwyn finds herself hesitating to place any other appellation upon the relationship. Why? she wonders. Is the idea that the girl and the giant might actually love one another so abhorrent? Is it so grotesque or perverse that she refuses to admit to its possibility? Or is it, her contrary little reptile whispers huskily into her inner ear, merely jealousy? Jealousy?

  Bronwyn had never seen Thud without his clothes, though she have once speculated upon what it might be like when she saw the virtually nude Kobolds, subsequently deciding that she would never be that curious. Yet, now, seeing the big man wallowing and thrashing about in the water like a sportive manatee, or drying himself in the sunlight that enwraps him like butter melting over a hot loaf of bread, his transformation is vividly underscored. He is still big, of course, but somehow not as big as she remembers him. All the changes are of that same indefinable order: nothing so specific that she can readily identify them, yet cumulatively so disturbingly different. His vast body is no longer as huge and swollen as a barrage balloon; it has instead the firm-looking bulk of the professional wrestler, and there is something inexplicably rearranged about his proportions. His face is still moon-like, but its simple, unaffected kindness has been joined and seasoned by a new worldliness (and Bronwyn remains absolutely dumbfounded by Thud’s new and unexpected facility with speech). As she lay on her rock, propped up upon her elbows, she is suddenly struck by a thought so strange, so weird, so bizarre in its wild unexpectedness, that it almost frightens her: Thud looks positively handsome.

  Dizzied by this uncanny revelation, she turns her gaze upon Gyven, who lay on his back less than an arm’s length from her. He looks like part of the rock upon which he is lying, the nearly flat planes of his body looks like a sculptor, using a broad knife on his clay, has made a rough cut of an heroic statue. Reclining Warrior, perhaps. His skin is the same color as the iron-stained sandstone. She extends an arm and touchs his chest with the palm of her hand; he feels as smooth and warm as the stone. He does not move. She brushes her fingers down the long, undulating muscles of his sandstone stomach, like the petrified ripples of a prehistoric beach, and then into the thick black hair below. She moves further and his hand lazily raises and grasps her wrist. He rolls to face her, his eyes open and glittering at her like amused moonstones. “What are you doing?” he asks, smiling.

  She laughs. “What’s wrong with Thud?” she asks, irrelevantly, to throw him off balance.

  “Pardon?”

  “Why has Thud become so . . . different?”

  “Oh. I thought you would’ve known. I hadn’t thought to say anything myself. You remember what King Slagelse told you about the Kobolds?”

  “He told me a lot of things.”

  “You remember his version of the creation of human beings?”

  “I think so. He believes that we are the descendants of Kobolds who have come up to the surface world. That the sun and open air and whatnot gradually and eventually . . . “ she looks toward the big man with sudden, if unrecognized, comprehension. “Are you telling me that . . . ?”

  “That Thud is turning into a human being? I don’t know. It’d all been purest legend to me until now. Can it happen to one Kobold in his or her own lifetime, or does it require generations? I have no idea.”

  “Well,” she says, looking at her old friend with awe, “what do you know about that?”

  Their arrival in Blavek, with their prisoners, is less than triumphal, which suits Bronwyn fine. The lack of overt enthusiasm is not the fault of the city, which would have loved to have made a procession of her entry, and in fact is more than a little hurt at having been denied the possibility, but rather the lack of self-announcement with which her party rode into Blavek in the misty hours of dawn, avoiding the city proper, going directly to the chambers of the Privy Council. There, the princess turns her prisoners over to an astonished Mathias, whose anger and indignation at her disappearance has to be temporarily stifled. It has been more than three weeks since she had abruptly vanished during the heat of the battle and he had frantically combed the city for her, even going to the grim length of having the river dragged for her body (and was rewarded and stupefied by the discovery instead of the waterlogged corpse of General Praxx). The only human being who had known of Payne’s plans to temporarily retire to Strabane before leaving the country is dead; the chamberlain had transferred what of his loot he had managed to move by circuitous means, through any number of intermediate steps, so no one can trace him by that means, either. The object of the entire invasion as well as its instigator have all vanished; it is infuriating.

  Now the vanished princess appears, in new clothing, looking as though she had been horsewhipped, with a bizarrely normal-looking Thud Mollockle and an attractive young woman he’d never seen before, with both Payne Roelt and King Ferenc as tightly laced as a pair of sausages. But it is the princess herself that occupies his astonished, subdued attenlion. She is somehow, and the duke is too unsubtle to decipher his perceptions, somehow not at all the same Princess Bronwyn who had disappeared that fire-filled night three weeks earlier. He had been prepared to chastise her roundly, like a disobedient child, as he had always thought of her if truth be known, but finds himself holding his tongue, without really understanding why.

  Bronwyn refuses to discuss anything that happened since leaving the city. “There’s something I must do first,” she says. “Do you still have the . . . box that Payne sent to me?”

  “Of course,” replies the duke, strangely and inexplicably awed and subdued by this strange new woman.

  “Bring it to me.”

  With Thud, Gyven and Rykkla as her only companions, Bronwyn walks the short distance that separates the palace from the Great Temple. She carries the cardboard box herself, though she never looks at it. She leads the others by a few paces; no one speaks a word.

  The plaza is empty in the early mo
rning hours and the few people who are out did not recognize their disguised princess. The temple had been ravaged; it is windowless and the big bronze doors stand open. Inside, Bronwyn, who has never been particularly religious, nevertheless feels saddened at the destruction she sees. The great tapestries that date from the earliest days of both Tamlaght and the Church are gone, as are all of the paintings and statues of the saints. The once finely carved woodwork had been ruined when its gilding had been scraped from it. The chandeliers are gone and the altar is only a hollow alcove. Only the great painting of the Weedking’s Kingdom, by Ludek Lach-Szyrma, that had so frightened the child Bronwyn, remains intact. Its horrors now seem subdued and naïve. The temple is now little more than a dull cavern whose hollow echoes mechanically return their footsteps. Bronwyn goes to the long, low wall that raises the daïs of the altar. In front of it, placed in the floor, are two rows of rectangular stone slabs, faced with bronze plates, almost all of them inscribed and ornamented.

  “The heroes of Tamlaght are all buried here,” says Bronwyn in a hushed voice. “Kings and queens, soldiers and poets. Thud, Gyven, can you move this lid?”

  “This has your brother’s name on it,” says Gyven with some surprise.

  “I know,” she says. “And this one has mine. Go on, open it.”

  The two men easily move the heavy stone slab.

  “Oh!” says Thud.

  “What is it?” asks the princess. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I just recognized this sarcophagus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I made it, but that’s not what I meant. Not exactly. It’s the one I hid you in, remember?”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  He looked at her and his little eyes blink once. He replies in the tone of an affronted artist: “I can tell.”

  “I brought this for you,” she says, handing Thud a small iron prybar. “Can you get that plate off?”