A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter

by Ron Miller

  A hand, rough as leather, touches her shoulder and carefully pushes her forward, until her nose nearly touches the water. Using handfuls of crude soap scooped from a wooden bowl, Thud begins scrubbing her body. In her previous life, Bronwyn would rather have died than have anything put on her skin like this corrosive, abrasive substance. Now it feels like smooth, rich cream. But then anything would have felt better than the unspeakable filth and slime that covered her. Thud’s soap is pungent and clean-smelling. A day’s worth of dirt washes from her, a day’s worth of pain and many weeks of fear and anger. She feels herself drifting; the firm massaging is hypnotic. She feels safe and, for the first time in months, as though she might have some hope in carrying out her mission.

  “Hold your nose,” Thud says, simultaneously pushing her face under the surface of the water. The heat presses against the lids of her sore eyes. She lifts her head and a corona of streamlets pours in a circle around her downturned face. Thud works a handful of the raw soap into her hair. His thick fingers knead her scalp as though it were a ball of dough.

  Bronwyn has long since passed into a kind of achronic reverie. She has no recollection of Thud lifting her from the bath, holding her by passing an arm behind her back while he rubs her dry with a coarse, brown cloth until she is as pink as a shrimp, nor any consciousness of being wrapped in ragged, patched blankets until she looks like a fat, hand-rolled-cigar, then laid so gently onto his straw pallet that it scarcely rustles. She had long since fallen asleep.

  Night has meanwhile fallen over the city of Blavek, and Thud has has to finish his work on Bronwyn by the light of a single tallow candle. When he is done, he carries the candle, not minding the molten pearls of wax that run over his fingers, over to the tintype portrait, surrounded by its field of gaudy paper flowers. He looks for a long moment at the silvery face that seems so alive in the flickering candlelight. Leaning forward slightly, he kisses it, just once, just so.

  Blowing out the candle, he crosses the lightless room. Only the grey square of the window relieves the darkness. He sits in the small wooden chair under the window, beside the table, and stares into the room for a long time before he, too, falls asleep.

  CHAPTER II

  THE ESCAPE

  The city of Blavek is more than the seat of the government, it is the largest city of the island kingdom of Tamlaght. It straddles the confluence of two rivers, the Moltus, which runs down from the springs and melting snows of the rugged northwestern mountains, and its smaller tributary, the Slideen, which meanders from the lowlands, forests and farms in the west. It is the Moltus, combining the waters of both, that continues on to the small estuary that opens into the sea about one hundred miles in a straight line to the south; one hundred and fifty miles if you followed the course of the river.

  Blavek lays at the fall line; the Moltus is navigable by ships of considerable draft as far as the city, but beyond, either to the north or the west, the two rivers are shallow, rocky and interrupted by numerous waterfalls and rapids. This is particularly true of the larger river, whose first major fall is on the outskirts of the city itself. A park has been established around the falls, named for an ancient king, otherwise forgotten; they are a considerable attraction for tourists.

  The city, to be truthful, has little else to recommend it, other than its size. It has been a commercial center long before it has become the home of the ruling families. Unlike the capitals of many other nations, which has been more or less built around the governmental cores and

  are consciously meant to be showcases, Blavek seemed a little drab, functional and uninviting. There are larger and more beautiful churches in other cities of Tamlaght, as there are more beautiful homes, larger and more attractively landscaped parks, broader boulevards, better restaurants, more exclusive shops and friendlier people. But not many. As most national capitals are a kind of distillation of the best of their respective nation’s art and culture, so Blavek’s drabness is representative of Tamlaght as a whole.

  The main city sits on a long, triangular peninsula between the converging rivers. It is virtually, if not literally, built on an island, since the peninsula is nearly cut off from the mainland by a broad pool in the Moltus directly below the falls. As a short canal cut this narrow isthmus, the city has been, in fact, turned into an island artificially. The city proper is very old, a settlement of some sort having been established on the peninsula as long ago as the twenty-eighth century, and it has been continuously inhabited ever since. It became a major port for maritime commerce about four hundred and fifty years ago, and grew rapidly in size and importance after that.

  As a result of haphazard and rapid growth during a period when most of the traffic within the city was either on foot or horseback, wagon or cart, its streets are a labyrinth of meandering ways, some barely wide enough to accommodate two people abreast. In the older parts of town, the second floors of the buildings jut beyond the lower, and sometimes the third floors as well, like inverted ziggurats. The streets are so narrow that the outside walls of the upper floors of facing buildings almost meet, it would be easy to step casually from the window of one through the window of the other. This has no doubt been done often enough, and perhaps not always very casually. The streets below are little more than dark, meandering tunnels.

  The buildings of the city’s business district are unprepossessing. They reflect the sober, business-minded, devout Blavek citizen. Vast blocks of severe brick office buildings, massive stone banks and commercial institutions, rows of anonymous warehouses, long ranks of mansions, squat and grey, as undecorative and forbidding as bank vaults. All broken only by the occasional small, uninviting park or one of the many churches built in the uninspired Musrumesque style.

  If the city of Blavek and its citizens seem bleak, colorless and without humor, it is perhaps because the city goes further back into the history of Tamlaght than any other ‘although it might be begging the question to suggest that Tamlaght actually has any other cities; towns and large villages account for its few other settled areas). It represents more than any other place the true heart of Tamlaght. Indeed, the name of the city comes from a pair of ancient words, blavis and vekken, meaning “root” and “soul,” reflecting accurately how Tamlaghtans think of their venerable capital. And if the root and soul of Tamlaght is best expressed by a bleak, grey city, what else need be said?

  The nation has never recovered from the intense xenophobia that had been inbred into its people from the earliest days of the island’s habitation. Mostly inspired by their Church, jealous and self-confident, Tamlaghtans never joined in the great renaissance of learning, science and art that had swept the Continent barely two centuries earlier. They viewed such advances with distrust and considered them immoral, unnecessary and decadent. They clung to their True Faith and the simple ways of a thousand years earlier. As the power of the Church waned, however, eroded by the glamour radiating from the enlightened and ever more powerful nations across the Strait of Guesclin, progress was allowed, albeit reluctantly, to seep into Tamlaghtan Society. Businessmen, still fearful and mistrusting of anything foreign, had seen themselves bypassed, and growing poorer; there was no longer any market for the crude goods, unrefined and artless, of their country. Only the banking houses thrived, the dour honesty and canniness of Blavek’s bankers have always attracted the rich merchants and investors of the Continent.

  So the ancient hermit-city of Blavek, as the country’s only seaport, found itself in the position of also being Tamlaght’s most cosmopolitan city. Its cheap labor, uneducated, unskilled peasants lured by Blavek’s siren-song, made it attractive to those businesses whose factories turned imported materials into exported goods. Thus was created the industrial quarter of the capital city, an island of modernity in a stubborn mediaeval sea. An island regarded with an almost superstitious suspicion and contempt.

  Across the Slideen to the south has grown the sprawling Transmoltus district. Here, spreading from the seed provided by the docks and shipyards
, is the most modern addition to Blavek. Made possible by the invention of mechanization on the Continent and the reluctant importation of steam power barely a century ago, the Transmoltus is the industrial quarter of the whole nation. Here crowded scores of factories producing every conceivable product, from steel to cheap jewelry, from leather goods to clothing, from glass to furniture, from patent medicines to dairy products, from the products of slaughterhouses to coal yards. And sarcophagi, of course.

  Almost none of which, except the latter, are intended for domestic consumption. Virtually all of the materials are imported, though Tamlaght is certainly rich in untapped natural resources of its own, and virtually all of the products are for export. Blavek treated the Transmoltus like a cancer, a thing to be contained. It was not about to be allowed to spread beyond its strict confines. While raw materials came in and finished products go out, the Transmoltus has no outlet for its other produce: incredibly noxious factory wastes; criminals; hungry, ignorant, jobless people; armies of street-bred urchins; the envy and loathing of the outside world.

  Dreary roads, black with cinders and coke, wind around the sides of the monolithic factories. Heaps of variegated trash, which the scanty vegetation fails to cover, glance and glare like the eyes of a basilisk. The air is heavy with smoke which hangs like a pall over the lifeless earth. Not a bird nor a reptile nor an insect is to be found. Above all this rise dark masses, huge and strange, an agglomeration of regular buildings, symmetrically pierced by tall windows, and surmounted by a forest of cylindrical chimneys continually vomiting clouds of oily smoke. Red lightning flashes like fire through the black curtain that veils the sky, while a distant roaring resembles thunder or the beating of surf on a rocky shore.

  The Transmoltus is dirty, smoky, loud, busy, odorous, rough, ugly and squalid. While it has made the City immensely wealthy, no one in the City liked to be reminded that it existed. Not one of them would have been caught dead on the south side of the Slideen, which, naturally, would probably be their fate if they were to go there. Even the police do not patrol the district’s streets except in pairs, and not at all at night.

  The simple people of the countryside consider the Transmoltus an abomination, a literal outcropping of the Kingdom of the Weedking, their Hell, and treat it as anathema, avoiding looking in its direction, passing too closely to its borders or speaking its name aloud.

  Lying in the broad, shallow Slideen between the City and the Transmoltus is the artificial island on which the royal palace, the houses of the Privy Council and the various chambers of the government have been established. The island spans the river nearly from bank to bank. Over the years so many bridges and buildings have been built across the river that it now runs in tunnels beneath broad causeways.

  Thud is still in the chair, which after all really does hold him, when Bronwyn wakes in the morning. A slender needle of light lancing through a hole in the window’s gauze-like curtain, hits her squarely in the left eye. She shields that eye from the glare and can then see the mountainous silhouette of her rescuer bulking opposite. Rescuer and protector, she thinks, suddenly remembering the events of the previous night. That immediately leads to a recollection of the events that has preceded those, and she shudders. Nevertheless, she has escaped with her life, has found a haven safe and warm, and now has some real hope of carrying through with her plans.

  She listens to the low rumbling of Thud’s breathing, like that of a dreaming tiger. With the help of a man like him, I can do it. But how to go about recruiting someone who seems so content? His power appears to be limitless but so does his inertia; he is more like an ox than a bull: placid and imperturbable. Then why did he risk his life to rescue me? He did it as though there had been nothing unusual about it at all; not once did he show any particular emotion, other than concern for my safety.

  Would he do it again?

  Her eyes metaphorically roamed the room. It looked far worse in the light of morning. Her first thought is of her precious satchel. She discovers it lying next to her, against the wall. It appears to have been left scrupulously untouched, but who can tell about such things? She feels a little guilty unbuckling the straps that hold the flap closed. Beneath is a seam, tightly laced shut. Unthreading this, and opening the mouth of the bag, she pulls out one of the bundles it contained. It is tightly wrapped in oilcloth and tied with waxed string. Her wax seal over the knot seems intact. Leaving the others uninspected, she replaces it and recloses the bag. She continues her visual tour of the room. Her gaze stops at the tintype surrounded by its paper flowers. It’s like an altar! She then recalls Thud’s one admission the night before when she realized that there might be more motivating the big man than mere whim: he hated the Guards.

  Bronwyn wriggles out of the cocoon in which she had been wrapped. The wood stove has long since gone out, but the early morning sun baking the slates of the roof has warmed the little room beneath. She stretches like a cat, up on the balls of her feet, her hands nearly reaching the ceiling, arching her back until her joints and seams crack, one after the other. She then looks around the room to see if she can find something to wear. She notices that the tin tub and the buckets are gone as are her old, torn clothing of the day before.

  Padding softly on bare feet, she searches the room’s several corners until she finds a pile of rough cloth. This turns out, when she holds it up, to be one of Thud’s tunics. It looks like a tent. She slips it over her head and it promptly falls to the floor around her feet. Barely suppressing a laugh, she goes back to her bed and finds a blanket that is about five feet square. It is riddled with moth holes. Feeling only a little guilty about destroying a possession of someone who has so few, she works her fingers into a hole near the middle of the blanket and carefully begins tearing the cloth. In only a minute or two, she has enlarged the hole enough so that she can pass her head through it. Wrapping a cord around her waist, she succeeds in creating a kind of poncho.

  Now what? Do I dare try waking the sleeping giant? Why not?

  She touches his arm and says softly, “Mr. Mollockle?”

  His bright little eyes open immediately and he says, “Good morning. How are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  From where he is sitting, Thud reaches for the oil stove and begins pumping its lever to build up the pressure needed to light it.

  “Would you like some breakfast?”

  “Yes!”

  Amazing! The man came awake instantly; there had been no transition between sleep and wakefulness where it had taken me several minutes to work the sleep out of my eyes and the kinks from my bones. Oh, Musrum,if only I can get this man to help me!

  In just a few minutes, Thud has the fire lit and a pan full of fat canned sausages frying. After they have browned a bit, he adds a can of small, sliced potatoes and an onion he has minced. The smell is wonderful and Bronwyn hopes he can’t hear her stomach growling eagerly in response. He has already heated water for tea in a squat tin pot. He puts a pair of heaping spoonfuls of black leaves to brew in it. He produces a half-loaf of bread, full of bubbles, yeasty and crusty, and the meal is complete. Bronwyn is handed a stoneware plate, its surface crazed with brown cracks. Thud divides the food exactly in half, scooping the sausages and potatoes onto her plate. It looks far too much for her and woefully inadequate for him. He pours her tea into the same mug she used the night before; she takes it and squats on the floor to eat. Thud has not moved yet from his place in the little chair. Everything he has done, he has done from there.

  He tears a chunk from the loaf and passes it on to the girl. She tears off a smaller bit and uses it to mop up some of the savory juices puddled in her plate.

  “Mr. Mollockle?” she asks around a mouthful of food. “Aren’t you curious about yesterday?”

  “Yesterday?” He spoke the word as though it are a concept new to him.

  “Yes. Don’t you want to know why the Guards were after me?”

  “I knew I didn’t want them to get you, I don’t want them
to get anyone. Why, did you get them mad?”

  “Oh, Thud! Did I get them mad? You have no idea!”

  “No...I guess not.”

  “Do you know how many Guards there are?”

  “No. A lot?”

  “A lot indeed. There are ten thousand, Thud.”

  “Ten thousand...I see. That’s a lot, isn’t it?”

  “And, Thud, they’re all mad at me.”

  “All of them? Why? I don’t understand.”

  “Give me some more tea. It’s a long story.”

  And it is, indeed.

  Even though Thud interrupted very seldom, it is a long time before she finished. This pleased Thud, since he hates to talk while eating, even more than he hates to talk at any other time. He also began to think it might be the last meal he would ever have in his little home; and when she finished talking he is sure of it.

  This is what Bronwyn told him:

  “My brother is Ferenc, the Prince of Morvane-Silenne and Heir to the throne of Tamlaght. Do you understand what that means? I’m the Princess Bronwyn. When our father, the king, died last winter, what? eight months ago already!, Ferenc is the heir to the throne. When the coronation takes place in a few weeks, he will be the new king. Ferenc III. You remember when the king died? Well, maybe it really doesn’t matter much to you. It probably isn’t very important to people like you; I suppose your lives go on pretty much the same no matter who’s on the throne. But believe me, it’ll be different if my brother is crowned. He’ll sit on the throne with the orb of St. Wladimir in one hand and the wand of St. Splitz in the other, but it won’t be Ferenc who will be ruling Tamlaght. It’ll be something truly evil.