A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter

by Ron Miller

  Using the shelter of the open door as a shield, Thud takes the lantern from his bag. It is homemade from an empty can, with the label soaked off and the metal polished, inside and out. Holes punched around its bottom seam allow air to reach the candle and a square hole cut in the side lets the light escape in a single direction, reflected from the shiny, curved inner surface. He has fashioned a conical cap out of another piece of tin and finished it with a handle made of baling wire. It is really a very neat job. He lights the candle and replaces the little metal dunce cap. A shaft of yellow light beams from the lantern’s square cyclopean eye.

  Still without a word, Thud proceeds down the steps with Bronwyn close behind. It is a short flight that leads to a small, brick-floored room. All of the walls are stone. An arched passage leads to the top of another flight of steps. These also are of stone and descend much further. There is no railing and the steps are mossy, wet and rounded with use. Bronwyn hugs the damp wall, certain she is going to shoot off into the darkness with her next step onto the slimy stone, which is as slick as wet ice. She reaches the bottom dizzy from holding her breath.

  She now finds herself deep within the foundation of the building. Fat columns of roughly-cut stone support a low, vaulted roof from which hang stalactites of dissolved mortar. The floor is grey dirt compacted to the hardness of cement. In the darkness beyond the glow of Thud’s little lantern, she can hear scuttling, scampering and a squeaking like someone twisting a wet cork in a wine bottle. She is reminded all too vividly of the cat-sized rat that had run past her face the afternoon before, she can still see its malevolent red eye, like a drop of blood, and the wet yellow tusks.

  Following as closely behind Thud as she can while avoiding being stepped on, which would be disastrous, she accompanies him to one of the walls. It is pierced, she discovers, by a row of deep, square windows. She can feel air drifting in through them and can hear a faint trickling from the stream outside. The bottom edges of the holes are on a level with her chin.

  “Are there bars?” she asks in an anxious whisper. “It’s pitch black out there, I can’t see a thing. Can we get out?”

  “Well, you can, but those holes look awfully little for me.”

  “You mean you think you won’t be able to squeeze through?”

  “I forgot I was a lot littler the last time I came down here.” He gestures to her. “Come get in front of me. I’ll lift you up. Slide through and see if you can tell where the ground is.”

  Thud lifts Bronwyn onto the stone shelf. The window is about half her height in depth. She wriggles and finds her head in the open air. The black earth is only a few inches below her chin. As much by its smell as by its sound she can tell that the water is only a few feet away. She pushes herself backwards and drops back into the basement.

  “The ground’s almost level with the window,” she reports.

  “Good,” says Thud, as he runs his hand all around the perimeter of the square opening. Suddenly, with a grunt, he hoists himself into the hole. His broad, flat feet waggle in front of Bronwyn’s nose for a moment; then he drops back to the floor, with an appropriate, well, thud.

  “It’s gonna be awful tight. Stay here for a minute.”

  He vanishes into the dark before Bronwyn can utter a word.

  Where does he think I’d go? she wonders. She can follow him by the lance of flickering light that ducks and shoots around among the black columns like a little comet. When it turns back toward her, with the looming black bulk of Thud behind it, she is reminded of the great steam locomotives she had seen in pictures ‘and which she desperately wanted to see in reality). Thud, she sees, has a big ball of black slime mounded in his hand, with thick drools dangling from between his fingers.

  “I found a leaky oil pipe,” he says by way of explanation. “Hold the light, please?” She takes the tin cylinder and holds its beam on him as he smears the gelatinous substance over his equatorial circumference.

  “All right,” he says, apparently satisfied with the mess he has made of himself. Once again he climbs into the window. He jams himself in tightly, his enormous spherical rear suspended above the floor like a balloon.

  “Princess!” She hears his voice float in from one of the adjoining windows. She runs to it and lifts herself onto the slippery shelf, just barely avoiding cracking her head on the stone above. Slithering as quickly as she can, she pops her head out into the open on the other side. There is Thud’s head just a couple of yards to her left. It looks like a jack-o’-lantern sitting in a window. He calls her name again. “Stop doing that!” she hisses. “Someone’s going to hear you!”

  “I need your help, please,” he whispers. Bronwyn extinguishes the lantern before crawling out onto the moist, gravelly soil, which is so close to the edge of the window that she is able to emerge on her hands and knees. She stands erect and hurries over to Thud. His little round head is at knee level, his arms and hands protruding on either side. “Take my hands, please,” he asks, “and pull as hard as you can. I’m only stuck a little.”

  Bronwyn takes one of his wrists in each of her hands, and Thud in turn grips hers. His are so thick that even her long fingers fail to circle them. She pulls. She pulls again, so hard she can feel her face turning deep red. She releases his arms with a gasp of exhaled breath.

  “I moved, I think,” he says “I just got to get my knees in the hole.”

  She grips him again, bracing her feet against the stone at either side of the opening. She pulls until her body is as taut as a bowstring and almost parallel with the ground. Suddenly Thud’s body comes free and Bronwyn shoots away from the wall like a quarrel from a crossbow.

  She lands squarely on her rear ten feet away with a jolt that clacks her teeth like a nutcracker. She slides backwards on the smooth, small pebbles until she comes to a stop in a few inches of cold water. Her jaw aching, her coccyx feel inches shorter, she is afraid to bite down, certain that at least three inches of her spine must be protruding from her mouth, and the water she is sitting in is making her feel exceedingly uncomfortable.

  Thud emerges from the window like a fat pupa wriggling from its egg case. He waddles over to where she sits and helps her up. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she answers, waggling her jaw. She thinks she can feel her vertebrae rattling like beads on a string.

  “All right. Now we just follow the water.”

  He starts off ahead of her and she has to hop and skip a few steps to catch up. Bronwyn decides then and there that she would have to speak to Thud at the first opportunity about this continual habit of giving her orders. He has to be made to understand that she does not take orders, and that he is making her angry. Of course, there is no real point in making an issue of the matter until they reached safety. No point, she decides, in offending her rescuer.

  They keep to the scanty strip of gravel as often as they can, not wishing to make any noise by splashing water or taking the risk of a fall.

  The narrow ravine they are in is absolutely lightless at the bottom. Only the upper stories of the buildings, which loom above them in dizzily vertical walls, are silverily phosphorescent in the light of the hidden moons. Directly overhead is a ribbon of indigo sky, like a blued-steel bandsaw blade . The buildings between which they are passing seem for the most part uninhabited; probably all warehouses or factories; only an occasional ruddy light shines through the midnight walls, like a nova in a starless sky. They pass under several footbridges, which span the stream at various heights. They pass by the open mouths of numerous drains, pouring or dribbling their effluvia into the community sewer that the stream has become.

  They have just detoured around a fat iron conduit that protrudes from the wall beside them when Thud suddenly stops with a low warning hiss and pushes Bronwyn back behind the big pipe. With an almost inaudible whisper, he says into her ear: There’s someone up ahead.

  Her heart shrinks, curling into a quivering little ball like a frightened hedgehog. She bends down and l
ooks under the pipe where it clears the bank by half a foot. She can see nothing; then, suddenly, she hears the faint, crisp sound of paper being crumpled. She looks in the direction of the sound, avoiding using her direct vision, bringing the more sensitive peripheral part of her retina into play. Under the shadow of a footbridge...yes! The sudden flare of a match and the bearded face of one of Payne’s Guards appears and is gone again. She blinks and can see the negative image of the face. Thud touches her shoulder, and his breath tickles her ear. It smells like cloves. “Wait here. Don’t move, please.”

  She reaches to touch him, but he is already gone. She ducks down and peers from under the rough, wet pipe. Thud has melted into the darkness. An agonizingly long moment passes; then she hears a mumbled grunt and the clatter of something metallic dropping onto the stones. Quiet again for a heartbeat and then a sharp crack, like a broomstick broken over a knee. She can guess what that sound represented and feels ill. The agonizingly long moment before seems like nothing compared to the time it takes Thud to return to her. When she hears his soft voice ask, “Princess?” she could have laughed with relief. But she is both too smart and too frightened to do that.

  “I am sure surprised to find a Guard down here!” he hisses. “They must want you real bad. It is a good thing they don’t know someone’s with you.”

  It certainly is! And certainly nothing like the champion I have in you, Mr. Mollockle!

  The passage of only a few hundred additional yards brings them around a sharp bend and the harbor opens before them. The stream runs directly into the Slideen, and the parallel walls that had been flanking the two fugitives go right to the water’s edge. The river water laps against the buildings’ foundations around either corner. The gravel bank has disappeared and the stream has widened to fill the space from wall to wall. Thud and Bronwyn are forced to wade to get beyond the limit of the brick and stone canyon. The water only covers their ankles when they first stepped into it, but it quickly deepens. It is above Bronwyn’s knees when they reach the point where the stream actually joins the river, and above her waist when they enter the harbor. The water only comes to the top of Thud’s elephantine thighs.

  Turning to the right, they see a broad ledge running along the front of the building; steep stairs rise from it to meet doors at different levels in the façade. Steps also lead down into the water, apparently to allow access to boats of assorted sizes. The anchorage beyond is a confused mass of ships and boats of every imaginable size and shape: hulls, some like massive, square black mountains, others low-slung and rakish; a jungle of masts and spars, festooned with cobwebs of rigging; smokestacks, some squat and barrel like, others like slender pipes; the enormous striding spider-shapes of cranes and derricks. Pale clouds of steam and opaque clouds of smoke drift and shift among the tangle like ponderous and incurious cetaceans cruising through the lightless forests of the deep.

  Wharves and piers protrude into the river like the teeth on a comb, adding to the general and disorienting confusion. From the palace on the island upstream shimmer lights that are twinkling and merry, giving Bronwyn’s heart a painful jab as if some secret joke was being emphasized. She has often watched the coming and going of the busy Slideen shipping. She remembers how she had spent hours on sunny afternoons or crimson evenings watching the elegant craft come and go. She would wonder where they had been, what kinds of cargos they were delivering into the warehouses, what might be in those mysteriously anonymous crates, cartons, bales, hogsheads and barrels she saw the cranes lifting from the deep wells of holds, like their feathered namesakes dipping into a pond to spear some surprised frog. True to the national distrust of anything foreign, few monarchs of Tamlaght, and fewer of its citizens, have ever wished to leave its borders, or ever have. In recent history, only the western portion of Londeac,

  where it bulges toward the island of Guesclin ‘the great island of which Tamlaght occupies the largest part), separated by the few miles of the Strait, has been visited by a Tamlaghtan ruler. And then only because until just two generations earlier, it had been a territorial possession, since ceded to Londeac, thereby saving xenophobic future monarchs the trauma of ever again having to face the possibility of having to leave the island proper.

  In all her life, Bronwyn has never been farther from Blavek than the estuary at the mouth of the Moltus, scarcely one hundred miles to the south. Those visits to what seemed to be the edge of the world haunted her. The great ships that came and went, where did they come from?

  Where did they go when they disappeared over the horizon? The poles of the planet are as alluring to her heart as they are to the needle of a compass. She devoured geographies and never went to sleep at night without first having explored the enormous globe that swelled luminously in her room. She would orbit it, trapped within its irresistible gravitation like a helpless satellite. It had been created by a master cartographer and illuminated lovingly by four monks, one of whom died before his masterpiece was complete, but much of the lovingly applied gilt and colored paint had been eroded by her traveling fingers.

  She had traced the routes of the great adventurers, explorers, traders and caravans. With her fingertips, she had tried to imagine what the painted deserts might really feel like, what the green tempera patches of jungle might sound like at night, what the people who lived on the banks of the mighty rivers, meandering the globe like the blue veins on a great, milky breast, looked like, how strange their tongues might sound. She tried to conjure the smells and tastes and textures represented by the cartographer’s symbols. But her imagination was never as sufficient as it was provocative.

  All the ships that came and went on the Slideen, and the Moltus beyond, she thought were beautiful. She loved the functional-looking freighters: they looked boxy and gruff, with no nonsense about them, like the mustachioed, red-cheeked sergeants in the Royal Army. Some carried three or four masts but more and more were converting to steam...and she chafed for the hundredth time at having never in her life actually seen a real steam engine, those wonderful symbols of the Conqueror Engineer, with her own eyes. A stumpy funnel protruded behind their wheelhouses, pouring out boiling clouds of black coal smoke that made the sun look rusty brown when it shone through them. Yet they kept their masts even though they might be as rudimentary and functionless as an ostrich’s wings. Outsiders, other than merchants, seldom came to Blavek, but on rare occasions an elegant yacht would pull into the harbor. Its hull would be as white as an iceberg, its long, low superstructure glinting with polished wood and brass. Its masts would be raked back at a slight angle, its funnels, too, if it had them, giving it an impression of speed even as it sat motionless in the midst of the river’s more mundane traffic, like a greyhound in a dog pound.

  Pilot-boats and steam-launches would crawl across the grey water, leaving behind them pale wakes, like fat snails sliding over a sheet of glass. She remembered how at night she would watch the twinkling yellow lights from portholes and the bright beacons of red and green running lights that looked like stars against the dark water, shifting and changing as though Musrum were stirring the very constellations with His great forefinger.

  Bronwyn looked upstream and could see the lights of the palace and the hazy, bright glow of the lamps that illuminated the boulevard that spanned the river. She hadn’t realized that the harbor would lose so much of its romance when seen close at hand at night. She feels as though she is standing at the brink of a deep and primeval forest.

  “We need to find a really small boat,” whispers Thud. Which they do very soon; a shell that looks scarcely large enough for Thud by himself. It is tied to the end of the platform by a long painter, which they use to maneuver the boat to the foot of one of the sets of steps. Moments later they find themselves adrift.

  “When I was a kid,” whispers Thud, leaning toward Bronwyn and rocking the little boat distressingly. Bronwyn had never been a great one for swimming, let alone in the chilly, black waters of the Slideen on a starless night, and as Thud’s move
ment shifts the center of gravity toward her; cold water slops distressingly over the gunwale. “When I was a kid,” he continues, “I made myself a raft from some barrels and stuff. I couldn’t steer it with paddles for nothing; it would only spin in circles. But if I just let ‘er alone, the current took me right across the river, right to Catstongue. Anything drifting in the river ends up in a big eddy there. If we just let ourselves go, we’ll be all right.”

  “I can’t believe this is your big plan,” Bronwyn answers testily, forgetting that it seemed fine to her only a few hours earlier. “And I wish you’d sit still!” At that moment, a large steam-pilot passes them in the channel, its paddles thrashing the water like a vast eggbeater. The little boat spins in the wake as though it were caught in a whirlpool. Bronwyn grips the sides until her fingers ache, and she squeezes her eyes shut, flinching at every splash of icy water that hit her. The shell is sucked into the middle of the river. The moving lights of ships are all around them, ghostly hulks, hissing steam or creaking with cables; their engines and chains clanking. Voices come over the water from all directions. Bronwyn feels like a rabbit in a herd of cattle.

  “I don’t remember it being this busy,” apologizes Thud.

  “You are just a dumb kid thirty years ago, that’s why.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”