A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist (16 page)
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Authors: Ron Miller
Dinner is desultory, in spite of everyone’s attempts, for whatever private reasons they may have, to maintain individual façades of cheerfulness. Only the baron is any good at this and even he is not altogether successful, seeming more preoccupied and older than Bronwyn had ever seen him. His normal exuberance and sense of wonder is effective in masking his true age, but now the princess realizes for the first time that Baron Milnikov is really quite an old man. His good humor and vivaciousness is so much a part of his personality; what had it taken to remove that from him?
Thud talks no more than usual, though Bronwyn tries to get him to describe the restoration of the castle wall.
Mathias is a perfect host, as always, yet his blatantly artificial attempts at casual conversation and the fact that she constantly catches him staring at her, and that when she does, his eyes would instantly dart elsewhere, like twin children discovered ogling a dirty picture, irritates her immensely.
For her own part, Bronwyn smiles and speaks of inconsequentialities, and the whole disastrous dinner seemed to take forever.
She refuses her dessert, which she donates to the thankful and bottomless Thud, and, proclaiming a headache, which is near enough to the truth, she avoids the insincere protests and went to her room.
She undressed and wearily climbed into bed. The tall windows beyond the footboard are open to the fragrant, heavy summer breezes. She can smell the river below as well as hear its heavy murmuring. A crescent moon, thin as an eyelash, is suspended within the trees, grinning at her simple-mindedly.
She sleeps fitfully. The governor on her brain is jammed, allowing that perverse organ to spin its wheels uncontrolled. A thousand thoughts run through her mind, endlessly and pointlessly repeated. She tosses and turns for what seems hours and finally gives up any idea of sleep.
The dawn is still little more than a metallic shimmer, as though the inverted bowl of the sky had been turned from steel, a concave spherical mirror reflecting an icy acetylene flame. The breeze has died sometime during the night. The air that oozes in through the tall window is moist and heavy. Bronwyn has thrown off her silk sheet, but the thick air itself is even more like a blanket; its movement is not cooling, but rather feels like some syrup warmed to viscosity, crude oil at blood temperature.
She had worn nothing to bed, expecting the sultry, still summer air. She looks down the foreshortened body that stretches away from her, blue in the faint starlight, an undulating, barren landscape, smooth, textureless, unexpectedly and inappropriately glacial.
Buried somewhere in the dark, moist depths of her brain is that primeval reptile. It is a primitive, scaly creature whose own brain is little more than a thickening at one end of its spinal cord. An egocentric monster whose only interests lay in immediate gratification: eat, sleep, kill, run, scratch, shit, piss, seek warmth, procreate. A million years of evolution has not yet been able to dissolve away this final, parasitic, anachronistic hanger-on from Bronwyn’s swampy origins. Its emotions and needs are simple and consequently powerful. When Bronwyn is angered or endangered, it is the reptile that wants to kill or bolt. It is the reptile that lifts one of her lips to expose a stunted canine in the totally ineffectual snarl-
cum
-sneer of the modern human. It is the reptile that wants every pleasurable sensation to continue forever, and it would accept no intellectual substitutes, either. Poetry, fine art, sunsets, good conversation, philosophy, landscapes, novels, or picturesque castles mean less than nothing. It accepts only the coin of physical pleasure. The purer and rawer the better. Wired to some device of Doctor Tudela’s that would stimulate the lizard’s pleasure center, the stupid little beast would keep the current pumping until it dropped dead, dying with its grin on. The problem, if it is a problem, is that the reptile has a firm grip upon Bronwyn’s emotions, her glands held in its irresponsible claws like the strings of a marionette, or the rubber bulbs that make toy frogs hop when squeezed in a child’s fist.
In the heat of that night the primitive lizard took control of Bronwyn, like a spoiled child at the wheel of a bus.
Bronwyn rises from her dank bed, throws a light robe over her shoulders and goes out onto her balcony. She looks out over the Wonthaggi. It is invisible, except as an iron-black vacancy, but she can smell the warm, earthy water. Her room faces the countryside northwest of Diamandis; the landscape is dark and lightless. To either side, the windows that break the wall of the castle are all dark, except for one in the round spur tower that terminates the wall to her right. It is in an oriel hanging from the sheer wall, the light yellowed by the drapery that filters it. That oriel marks the duke’s own bedroom, she knows. Evidently he is having as difficult a time sleeping as is she.
She exits her apartment, turning left down the long corridor, her robe billowing around and behind her like the wake of a speeding torpedo ram or the flame of a torch; it would take only a trick of perspective to imagine that that fluttering torch is being dropped down a bottomless black shaft.
It takes only seconds to reach Mathias’s door and Bronwyn, if she pauses or hesitates it is not discernible, opens the door, enters, and closes it behind her. The duke is sitting at his desk, chin in hand, writing by the light of a small oil lamp, or at least in the pose of writing: his head is resting in one hand while the other holds a fountain pen the end of which he is absent-mindedly chewing. He is dressed only in a pair of snug-fitting, knee-length underdrawers tied at his waist with a cord. His chest is bare and when he sluggishly turns to see who has entered, the brassy light slides across his chest like a golden oil. He says nothing when he recognizes the princess, but sits upright in the simple wooden chair, his head thrown back, eyes hooded, nostrils slightly flared as though he were testing an unfamiliar scent. He lays the pen diagonally across the paper upon which he had been writing and stands. The backs of his legs push the chair back and its feet squeal briefly on the polished floor. He makes no move toward the princess, nor does he yet say a word, but a betraying catalog of expressions briefly exhibits itself.
The duke looks taller in the half-light, Bronwyn thinks, his body as sculptured as Gyven’s had been but more polished; the hard, unfinished edges are smoothed and muted. He reminds her of a relief map, like an aerial view of the rugged steppes of Peigambar. Even sitting quietly at his desk Mathias had been perspiring, which gives him the shimmering patina of a well-oiled engine. She watches the great bellows of his chest rise and fall, the shifting fasciae of flexible rods within his arms, the shadow of his stomach that deepens as he moves his shoulders back and draws in a long, deep breath. It escapes slowly in a prolonged hiss.
Bronwyn crosses the room to the tall oriel windows. She throws back the heavy curtains and the first cold, ivory rays of dawn stream in and over her.
Bronwyn turns and takes half a dozen long, deliberate steps, bridging the distance between herself and the silent duke. Not more than a pace separates them.
He touches her breasts with his fingertips. He presses his lips against the space between her breasts; his lips feel hot and dry. She feels her aureolae wrinkle like the smiling faces of little old men.
Lowering himself onto his haunches, he presses his face into the ruddy triangle at the base of her stomach, against the soft mound it both hides and draws attention to. She feels the bite of sharp, fine teeth. She feels the heat, the ache and the sudden moistness. His tongue discovers the shallow groove that bisects the mound, like the entrance to the jeweled cave of the pomegranate.
Taking a step back, she raises him to his feet. She presses her hands flat against the hard chest, forcing him backwards. The chair screeches out of the way; two more steps and he bumps against the edge of the broad bed, automatically sitting to avoid falling. Bronwyn continues to press him back until she is leaning over him, her face above his. She kisses him as she lowers her body onto his; breast to breast, stomach to stomach, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. She feels his tongue enter her mouth, tasting her lips and teeth; her own fights against the intruder, and they wrap around one another like passionate snails. She turns her head but Mathias’s tongue drills into her ear like a corkscrew.
Bronwyn feels the insistent pressure against her mons. He seems to be touching some harmonic within her; it is almost agonizing. Her eyes narrow to slivers of green glass, and she grins as she bites at her lower lip. Beads of sweat appear like morning dew. Mathias enters her as cautiously as a cobra exploring a mongoose’s burrow.
She sits slowly, rocking, feeling the pressure and fullness increasing within her. She feels like a butterfly on a pin, a cancelled invoice on a spike, a wheel on an axle, the earth spinning on the great forefinger of Musrum. She takes Mathias’s head between her hands and presses her lips against his, the hard tips of her breasts just brushing his, while his hips begin a slow, methodical dance of their own. The primal reptile bares its teeth and its low growl escapes the open cage of Bronwyn’s lips. She bites at Mathias’ ears, his nose, his lips; she nibbles with her sharp incisors at his neck, at the hard ridge of his collarbone.
He tastes of salt…
Bronwyn had often read in the forbidden, brown-jacketed little books she had stolen once or twice from the Guard rooms and smuggled into her apartment in Blavek Palace, how making love could make one seem to soar, to expand and fill the universe, she couldn’t at the moment recall all of the turgid imagery. But she finds that such expansiveness isn’t the case at all. Instead, she feels that the whole world has shrunk until it contains nothing whatever besides two bodies melting into one another like a pair of chocolate rabbits thoughtlessly left out in the sun. They are animals, not angels, reveling in their own egocentric flesh, in their sweat and scent and juices.
The universe has now shrunk even further until it contains nothing else than herself alone; then it begins to contract further still. Its perimeter becomes smaller than the shell of her body, it casts aside all of the unnecessary impediments: skin, flesh and muscle sublime like dew under the sun; eyes vanish like soap bubbles,
pop, pop
; veins, arteries and tangles of capillaries vanish like ropes in a magic show; lymph nodes and exhausted glands, pillowy lungs, gall bladder and spleen evaporate; pale yellow fat, maroon liver, terra cotta kidneys and yards of pearly pink viscera gone, too. Yet the universe continues to shrink, eating her up as it goes, until all two hundred and six bones of her skeleton, including the sesamoids, melt like candles in a furnace.
There is nothing left now but a naked nervous system, as alive as a fountain of lightning leaping from a thunderstorm. She is now as self-contained as the contemplative oyster, or the nautilus in the sybaritic privacy of its papyrus chambers. She begins to realize that perhaps the little brown books are in fact correct, after all: whether she expanded to fill the universe, or the universe shrank around her, the result amounts to exactly the same thing, it means the same thing, it feels the same.
There is now nothing left of Bronwyn but a nervous system that sings and sparkles like a rod of amber being stroked by a rabbit pelt; from the effervescent, glowing node halfway between toes and head, to the nexus where her skull had been, she has been refined to a base element like an alchemist’s tincture, like a ton of uranium reduced to a phosphorescent smear of hyperactive radium.
* * * * *
The morning has come and gone and afternoon is well under way before Bronwyn lazily flows out of Mathias’s bed, stretches on tiptoe, reaches for the ceiling, strides to the tall windows of the oriel and turns to face the duke, who still lies abed, propped against his pillows, watching the princess with an expression halfway between amusement and amazement. The windows surround Bronwyn on three sides and she is a dark silhouette against their diffuse glow. Only the fine down that covers her is illuminated: she looks like an outline drawn in phosphorescent ink, or an artistic demonstration of one of Tudela’s luminous electric tubes.
“I want something,” she says.
“What more could I possibly give you?” the duke replies with a smile.
“I want to raise an army. I want to invade Tamlaght. I want Payne Roelt put to death.”
CHAPTER TEN
DETERMINATIONS
Bronwyn knew her idyll had come to an end when her bedroom exploded. Had she not been in the deep, cast-iron bathtub at the time she, too, might have been as thoroughly scattered over the courtyard and gardens as are her furniture, walls, windows and portions of ceiling and floor.
The heavy vessel bongs like a church bell as it leaps a foot straight off the tiled floor. Bronwyn’s ears ring as she suddenly finds herself sitting in a more or less dry tub in the midst of a dripping bathroom. The air is filled with plaster dust, already forming a muddy paste on the walls and floor. The door has been blown off its hinges and glued to the opposite wall like a giant postage stamp. The princess climbs from the tub, discovering herself to be surprisingly dizzy, no doubt more than a little concussed, and wobbles over to the open doorframe. It is only her dazed state that keeps from her the full effect of seeing broad daylight where only moments before there had been a bedroom.
Her room had occupied a corner of the building and the explosion cut it off neatly across a diagonal. Only a triangular bit of floor and ceiling remains. Nothing whatever is left of the furniture or furnishings. The bathroom door is in one of the remaining walls and the door to the corridor is in the other. From this now comes the sounds of excited voices and shouting. Bronwyn is not too dizzy to remember that she had just left, or been ejected from, her bath and turns to look for her robe. She recalls that it had been hanging on the back of the door which just at that moment topples away from the wall it had impacted and falls to the tiles with a shattering crash, revealing the well-pressed garment on its upper side.
She has just wrapped herself when the outer door bursts open with a crash, her rescuers nearly toppling disastrously into the unexpected void. Among them are the duke and the baron.
“Bronwyn!” cries the former. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I think so. My room exploded.”
Mathias circles the crater, along the narrow rim of floor left, and embraces the shaken princess. The baron braces himself limply against the doorframe, while a dozen curious faces press around him. Bronwyn thinks he looks deathly pale and fears for his heart.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” repeats the duke.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
“What happened?” repeats the duke once they have gotten to his own room. The baron joins them, still looking wan and elderly, followed by Thud.
“I have some ideas,” replies the princess.
“Maybe it was a meteor,” offers Thud.
“Meteor?” asks the duke. “What are you talking about?”
“It is just an idea.” He had recently puzzled his way through an article on the subject of meteors which had appeared in the rotogravure section of the Diamandis
Clarion Call.
No one else recalled the article because it had been published nearly two months earlier, the length of time it had taken Thud to laboriously spell it out word by word. He was inordinately proud of having accomplished this, the first time in his life he had done such a thing, and had been anxious to show off the premiere tidbit of knowledge he had ever gained from a printed page. Bronwyn, the duke and the baron have no idea of what he has done and their conversation continues no wiser.
“It’s pretty obvious, don’t you think?” Bronwyn says. “Someone’s just tried to assassinate me.”
“Who’d want to assassinate you?” asks the baron.
“Good heavens, Baron! You of all people shouldn’t have to ask that!”
The baron looks confused for a moment, then says, “I . . . I just meant that it might be jumping to a conclusion to assume that it is an attempt to murder you.”
The princess looks at the baron through slightly narrowed eyes. “What do
you
think it was? A meteor?”
“Could be,” interjects Thud, hopefully.
“No, no, nothing like that,” says Milnikov. “All I meant was, it could’ve been, oh, I don’t know, a leaking gas main, perhaps, or something like that,” he concluded feebly and, realizing the feebleness, slumped dejectedly into a chair. He looked like a suit of clothes someone had carelessly draped over the furniture.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bronwyn asks.
“Nothing. I haven’t been feeling well. That’s all.”
“Do you want to see a doctor?” asks Mathias.
“No, thank you. It’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself, but I’d take care if I were you, you look mighty peaked, old fellow.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
“Mathias,” says Bronwyn, “if it is a bomb, how could it’ve been done?”
“What do you mean?”
“
Who
could’ve done it, for one thing? We know who must have
ordered
it, but who carried it out?”
“Oh. Anyone, I suppose. That is, I trust the staff here, but it’s fairly easy for people to come and go.”
“It wasn’t so easy for us to get in the first day we arrived.”
“That is different; you are strangers.”
“You’re saying it is someone the guards knew, or that it might have been someone in the castle?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but it could’ve been someone who is not
obviously
a stranger. I mean, the three of you are a pretty odd-looking crew, and you came marching directly up to the guardhouse and demanded to see me. Of course the man is suspicious. But someone from the town . . . or someone who
looked
as though he are from the town . . . might not have been challenged. Many people come and go, since there are administrative offices here, and of course there’re the men working on the restoration of the wall.”
“It’d probably be impossible to find who it was, then.”
“I’m afraid so. I’ll have inquiries made, of course, but I wouldn’t hold out any hopes.”
“You know who is behind it?”
“That doesn’t take much guessing: Payne Roelt and your brother, of course.”
“They could’ve left me alone,” she says, almost to herself.
“But you’d already decided to obliterate them.”
“Yes, but they didn’t
know
that. Well, it’s war, now.”
“War?”
“Absolutely.”
“Literally?”
“I’m tired of all this intrigue. I want to raise an army and wipe those two pills off the face of the earth.”
“I suppose it’s possible. But what country would want to declare war on Tamlaght? What would they gain?”
“That’s true, Princess,” adds the baron. “Forgive me for putting it this way, but no nation is going to war just for your sake.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that they do. I says that I want to raise an army, not that I want anyone to declare war on my behalf. This is my war; I declared it. I’ll hire the mercenaries and ships myself.”
“Those things’ll cost a great deal of money. Millions. Armies don’t come very cheap anymore.”
“I’ll get the money. I’ll have it afterwards, in any case.”
“Mercenaries don’t work on credit.”
“Well, I don’t think that she’ll really have to worry much about that, will she, Baron?” says the duke.
“What?”
“Raising money for her invasion, I mean. I can underwrite most of it, surely. It’d be easy to disguise the source of the funds, you understand why I’d have to do that, don’t you, Bronwyn?”
“Of course.”
“And, Baron, you are only just telling me how you had large bank accounts in Toth and Spondula. Just the other day you are discussing ways to get access to them secretly.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“So I know the princess can count on you for support.”
“Well, of course, but . . .”
“Now, Bronwyn, an army’s one thing, but you’re going to need good officers to run it. I can recommend several whom you can trust. I have some not inconsiderable experience at this myself. I can hire my own services through an intermediary. Now, you just can’t have armies invading other countries willy-nilly. They have to be there for some reason. I know you want to physically demolish those villains, and rightly so, but there must also be a symbolic aspect to the invasion as well. Otherwise, you might as well hire a gang of thugs to beat the two of them into a smoothly uniform paste. The citizens of your country would certainly resent the presence of a few thousand soldiers tramping across their countryside on a personal vendetta. It would do little good to wipe Payne and Ferenc out at the expense of turning the whole country against you. Therefore, at the very outset, it should be made clear that the army is there to represent not only your interests but the interests of the people of Tamlaght.”
“I couldn’t agree more!”
“Good. I think, then, that with the baron riding at the head of the army . . .”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Bronwyn.
“What’s wrong?”
“If the baron’s leading the army, where am I?”
“Here, of course. Why?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“What?”
“This is going to be my army . . .”
“Of course it is. That’ll be made perfectly clear. It’s the whole point of what I is trying to say.”
“You want the army to
represent
me. I don’t intend to be represented, I intend to be there.”
“There’s something to be says for that,” interjects the baron.
“That’s impossible,” says Mathias, with some annoyance. “You can’t lead an army.”
“Why not? I know the way to Blavek.”
“Well, who doesn’t? But what do you know about military command?”
“What do I have to know? I’d have officers for that. I only need to tell them, ‘I want to go to Blavek. I want Payne Roelt in prison and my brother thrown off the throne . . .’”
“That rhymes!” says Thud.
“ . . . and it’d up to them to carry out my wishes in the most expeditious manner. That’s what I’d be paying them for.”
“Good heavens, Bronwyn, d’you really know what you’re talking about?”
“Yes, I think so. Why? Do you think I
don’t?”
“Perhaps. You imagine that this is all going to be some big, romantic adventure. If nothing else, you’re talking about being virtually alone among thousands of the most repellent men on the continent.”
“So?”
“
So? I
can’t let you do that!”
“I’m not asking you to
let
me.”
“I won’t allow it!”
“How can you stop me? You don’t plan to help me raise the money, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“The only way I won’t go at the head of my own army is if there
is
no army. So the only way you can stop me is to keep me from getting an army.”
“I won’t go back on my promise, but neither can I let you go!”
“Only if you can figure out how to stop me; but honestly, I can’t imagine what you can do to prevent me.”
“It’s going to be incredibly dangerous.”
“Don’t forget I is nearly blown up an hour ago. I think you’re more upset about that than I am.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I be upset? And you are, too. If not, you should be!”
“I’m so angry I want to bite someone, but I’m not frightened. I think you’re just scared simple.”
“That’s not fair! I’m just concerned about your safety. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“Oh, yes? I’d probably be safer on a battlefield than in my bedroom here,” she pointed out rather brutally.
“Baron! Can you talk some sense into her?”
“I would if I agreed with you, but I’m not sure that I do. Besides, you forget that it’s not really my place to tell her Highness what to do.”
“Well
advise
her then, for heaven’s sake!”
“All right. Princess, the duke would rather that you stayed here while I led the army in routing Payne and Ferenc out of Blavek.”
“Forget it.”
“There. I tried,” says the baron, with a shrug.
“I forbid it!”
“How?” asks Bronwyn.
“Damn it!” the duke cries, finally losing his temper. “You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met!”
“You’d know best about that.”
The duke paces the length of the room three times, which brings him to the far side, opposite the princess, who has been watching his well-regulated fit with an uneasy mixture of annoyance, amusement and tolerance. The resulting expression is pretty much indistinguishable from a condescending smirk and Mathias has to muster all his strength to keep his voice even and his words civil. He clenches his fists at his side and speaks from a face as pale as the princess’ own.
“Look here, Bronwyn . . . if you cared at all about me . . .”
“
You
? What do my feelings about you have to do with this?”
“I’d hoped that you
did
have some feelings about me . . .”
“ . . . and the only way I can show them is to allow you to tell me how to run my life?”
“It’s my feelings about you that I’m speaking of.”
“Go on.”
“Well, you must know how much I care about you.”
“I thought I did, anyway.”
“All right, Bronwyn. I’d hoped, you know that I did, that you’d eventually choose to live in Lesser Piotr, perhaps even as its duchess.”
“Yes, I know, we talked about that. In spite of this conversation, it’s still an appealing idea. Why shouldn’t it still be?”
“Well can’t you see that I can’t let you put yourself at such risk?”
“It’s my decision, isn’t it?”
“Not if you’ve agreed to marry me, no. I forbid it. I absolutely forbid it. You’re a woman, not some guttersnipe of a tomboy, and it’s about time you realizes it. It’s not your place to do these things. It’s not dignified, it’s not womanly. I absolutely forbid it. That’s final.”
Bronwyn gets slowly to her feet. Her eyes are splinters of green glass embedded in a face as sleek and white as wet chalk. She is nearly as tall as the duke and, though they are still ten paces apart, her eyes seem to emit steel wires that transfixed him like a chunk of mutton on a shish kebab.
“What did you just say?” she asks, rhetorically, her voice even, low and preternaturally calm.
“I . . .” . . .
“Don’t say a word. Are you telling me what I can or cannot do?”
“No, I . .”
“Don’t interrupt me. I have no intention of becoming another decorative piece of furniture around here or anywhere else. I spent the first eighteen years of my life being a decoration, being told that I’m not good for anything else, being told, for Musrum’s sake, that I’m not as good as my brother. And not just because he’s male, more or less, but just because he happened to be born first. Well, I’m better than that. I’ve proved it. Do you have any idea what those blisters back in Tamlaght have done to me? I’ve told you enough times: you ought to know. Well, do you think for one moment that I’m at the end going to sit back and allow someone else to do what I have every right and intention of doing? I’ve earned the right to defend myself and I’m perfectly capable of doing so.”