A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  A very fat, bald man with a drooping moustache and only eight teeth (the result of advanced pyorrhea rather than the efforts of Rykkla and her friends) was helped by his shipmates to take a few steps forward. He tried to wring his cap in contrition, but found it too difficult with only one hand and a hook, settling instead for grinding a toe into the deck like an embarrassed schoolboy.

  “I be right sorry, ma’m. Don’t know wot come over me and me mates.”

  “That’s quite all right, Mr. Hole,” replied Rykkla. “I’m sure that it must have just been the surprise.”

  “Yes’m. It were a surprise indeed.”

  “Ladies,” introduced Basseliniden as others shuffled forward (except, of course, for the two men with broken legs), “this is Bighead and his son, Littlehead, Buzzard Beasley and Google Eye.”

  “No hard feelings, I assure you,” offered Rykkla graciously. “And I’m sure that I speak as well for my friends.” And to show that they agreed, Thursby smiled brilliantly and shook springy, coiled blonde tresses that looked like stacks of new doubloons being poured from one hand to another, while Gravelinghe nodded with a grim grunt of relunctant satisfaction.

  “Thankee, ma’m,” grimaced the father and son from their makeshift stretchers while tears welled in the other’s eyes, three real and a slightly cracked one that looked like hand-painted porcelain.

  Satisfied, the captain turned to the trio. “Why don’t all of you come down to my cabin, make yourselves a little more comfortable and have something to eat? I don’t know about your big friend here, but the other two of you look like you could stand a bite or two.”

  Basseliniden’s hospitality was more expansive than his cabin. Gravelinghe graciously and uncomplainingly sat on the deck, folding her great length until her knees flanked her ears, and quietly sucked the meat off a series of whole chickens. Rykkla and Thursby shared the captain’s narrow cot while the latter sat in the only chair. The stowaways’ story was told quickly enough and Basseliniden did not say a word during the recitation.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, when Rykkla and Thursby had finished, “I have no particular destination in mind; just cruising around, you understand, seeing where fortune might lead me. In fact, I was in Spondula only by chance, to, ah, dispose of some cargo. Have you any place in mind you’d like to go?”

  “Not particularly,” said Rykkla, “though I suppose that I’d like to get back to Tamlaght some time or another.”

  “Tamlaght’s as good a place as any,” added Thursby. Gravelinghe only asked if it were true that a war was currently ongoing in that country. When assured that there was, she only grunted and fell back onto her haunches.

  “Good enough,” said the captain. “If you’ll have a little patience, we’ll get you there perhaps sooner than later.”

  Thus began Rykkla’s brief but nonetheless interesting, and not unprosperous, career as a pirate. As she has written of these adventures herself in a memoir that has in time earned a substantial part of her income it would be inappropriate to repeat them here in any detail.

  More pertinent to this history are the castaway and the mutiny.

  The Amber Princess was cruising among the Isles of Langerhans, the miniature archipelago just off the southern coast of Tamlaght, when Captain Basseliniden decided to take on fresh water. No one had ever bothered to name the individual islands since there had never been any particular reason to do so: the Isles of Langerhans were for the most part barren, scrub-covered rocks inhabited only by a few handfuls of desperate-looking goats. The two or three larger islands, however, possessed springs that made them occasionally convenient, though no ships ever lingered longer than necessary. The Tamlaghtan Navy had, however, taken the trouble to number the individual islets on their chart, more or less in descending order of size. The Amber Princess was anchored only a dozen yards from the flinty flanks of islet No 3 and a crew had rowed ashore in a longboat laden with empty casks. Rykkla decided to join them, not out of any desire to be useful but simply because she wanted to get off the ship for a few hours.

  After the crew had pulled the longboat safely onto the shingly beach, she accompanied the men as they followed a sparkling stream to its source: a small pool bubbling from beneath a large rock. Leaving the men to their work, Rykkla strolled a hundred yards or so further inland. There was little to see: waist-high grey-green scrub that seemed as dry and brittle as ashes and half a dozen goats that stared stupidly at the intruder. The animals were half-starved, drab-looking things that were too unattractive to be interesting.

  Rykkla continued her walk, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to safely navigate the broken landscape, covered as it was with shattered, sharp-edged rocks of all sizes. She mounted the largest of these that she could find, in order to gain a vantage point from which she hoped could see what she could see.

  The isolated boulder, as it turned out, was the highest point on the islet and from even its slight elevation she could see water all around. To the south floated the Amber Princess. Below her, the beach, the spring and the men were invisible. To the east, west and north were several other islets, some only a few miles distant, others little more than a discrepancy in the level horizon. Between where she stood and the limits of the islet was only more of the confused mixture of spiky brush and jagged rocks. Atop dozens of the latter were perched the ubiquitous goats, looking like some sort of bizarre war memorials.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of one eye, she detected a flash of unexpected movement and color, so subliminal that her head turned in surprise before she was even aware that she had seen something. What could it have been? She looked carefully in the direction in which she had detected the movement, scanning intently, but there was nothing.

  Rykkla saw that the rock on which she was perched was part of a ridge that ran back in the direction from which she had come. Thinking that it would give her a panoramic view of the beach and ship, and perhaps an easier way back than the tortuous path she had taken, she followed it. As she had hoped, the ridge ended sharply in a low cliff above the sea near where the beach ended. Below her washed glassy, electric blue water so transparent that she could clearly see a gravelly bottom she knew must be twenty or thirty feet beneath the surface. To her left was the beach on which she had originally landed and it was crowded with the men who she had accompanied, shouting and cursing and shaking their fists. With good reason, she saw, since the longboat was headed back toward the Amber Princess without them. In the boat, clumsily plying the long, heavy oars, was a small figure Rykkla could not quite distinguish against the glare from the flashing waves. Even though the longboat was not yet very far from the beach, none of the men had even so much as attempted wading after it. She wasn’t surprised since she had already learned, to her astonishment, that most of the sailors could not swim. A typical failing among seafaring men, she was told. From her vantage point, Rykkla could see that the beach shelved quickly into deep water.

  With an exasperated curse, Rykkla removed her shoes, wrapped them in her shirt and tossed the bundle down onto the beach, where it landed with a thump at the feet of one of the men, who jumped convulsively at the unexpected sound. Turning back toward the cliffedge and without even another moment’s hesitation, she dived with not a little grace into the waves thirty feet below. She surfaced, tossed her hair from her face, got her bearings and struck out for the receding boat.

  Rykkla was a strong if not very skillful swimmer and she pulled with her powerful acrobat’s arms, quickly closing the gap that separated her from the fleeing longboat, her annoyance increasing in inverse proportion.

  When she reached the rear of the longboat, the figure in it clambered clumsily to meet her, smacking painfully at Rykkla’s fingers as she grasped the transom.

  “Damn it!” cried Rykkla, rocking the boat so violently that the figure in it stumbled and fell over a seat and onto the deck. Rykkla immediately flung one long leg over the transom and pulled herself into the boat. She instantly turne
d toward the stranger, who was only just then sitting up.

  “What the bloody hell do you . . . “ began Rykkla, but found the remainder of both the sentence and her anger forgotten as the stranger pulled herself erect. Musrum’s great protruding umbilicus! she thought, amazed in spite of herself. It’s just a kid! A girl kid, in fact, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with matted hair hanging in dark brown tangles to her waist, thin face with sunken cheeks and enormous, coffee-colored eyes; skinny arms and legs that looked even longer for their thinness. The poor thing looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month, was Rykkla’s first thought. The girl was dressed in only a few scraps of tattered cloth and odorous goatskin.

  “Hello, there,” Rykkla greeted the stranger girl, but received only a sullen glare in reply.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “In any direction away from that island.”

  “I don’t blame you much for that, but why didn’t you just ask for help? Those men aren’t going to be very happy with you, you’ll’ve put them to a lot of bother.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought that they might be some of Roelt’s men.”

  “Roelt? Payne Roelt? The Payne Roelt?”

  “There’s not more than the one, I hope?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You haven’t got anything to do with him, do you?” the girl asked warily.

  “Musrum forbid. In any case, I couldn’t even if I wanted to since he’s been dead for these last couple of years.”

  “Dead? Payne Roelt’s dead?”

  “As a mackerel.”

  “What about Prince Ferenc, and General Praxx? Are they dead, too?”

  “The general is, I’m pretty sure, but the prince has been locked up in a madhouse for a long time.”

  “I guess that’s good enough.”

  “Look, none of those men back there will do you any harm; what do you say we turn about and pick them up?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then we can all go back to the ship and sort out our stories.” Rykkla looked at the ribs protruding from the girl’s flanks and added: “There’s plenty to eat on board, too, and clean clothes.”

  “All right.”

  “My name is Rykkla, Rykkla Woxen.”

  “My name is Tholance.”

  Rykkla took over the oars and after only a few minutes was being pulled onto the beach by a dozen angry pirates who were more than a little disconcerted to see that they had nearly been marooned by a skinny little girl. As she reclaimed her shirt and shoes, Rykkla explained that Tholance had been a castaway trying to escape her prison. This did little to soothe the men, but their grumbling soon abated even if their surly scowls did not.

  “What the hell?” growled Basseliniden when he saw the stranger being helped aboard the Amber Princess. “What is this? a pirate ship or a girl’s school?”

  “She was a castaway,” replied Rykkla. “She was abandoned there by Payne Roelt.”

  “Payne Roelt? The Payne Roelt?”

  “That’s just what I asked. How many Payne Roelt’s can there be who’d abandon a twelve-year-old girl on a desert island?”

  “Not more than the one, I hope.” The captain looked the scrawny waif up and down with a critical expression. “Not awfully prepossessing. Have to get some decent food in her and some decent clothes on her, of course. Well, young lady, I’m Captain Basseliniden . . . ”

  “My name is Tholance.”

  “Well, welcome aboard the Amber Princess, Miss Tholance. Go along with Miss Woxen here and she’ll take care of you. Once you’re settled, we’ll have a talk and decide what’s to be done with you.”

  Rykkla took the girl to the galley, thinking that Tholance was more in need of food and drink than clothing. For several minutes she watched the girl absorbing food as efficiently and rapidly as a sponge, the silence broken only by smackings and suckings almost machine--like in their regularity.

  “Is Tholance,” Rykkla asked, “your first name or last?”

  “First. My last name is Milnikov.”

  “Milnikov? Milnikov . . . Why does that sound so familiar?”

  “My father is Baron Milnikov.”

  The girl had put down the biscuit upon which she had been chewing and looked up at Rykkla with her great, wet, brown eyes. Rykkla thought a little unkindly that Tholance looked like one of the maudlin pictures painted on velvet and sold on street corners. “Maybe I should have said ‘was,’“ continued the girl. “I know that if my father was alive, he’d have rescued me long before now.”

  “You’re right, Tholance; I’m sorry, but the baron is dead.”

  “Did Payne Roelt kill him?”

  “I really don’t know,” Rykkla answered, horribly embarrassed and uncomfortable. “I’m sure that he had something to do with it. I don’t know if this will mean anything to you or not, but Princess Bronwyn had your father’s remains buried in the Great Temple in Blavek.”

  “Father would have thought that pretty funny. It must really annoy the Church to have him there.”

  “I hope so. Tell me, Tholance: how long were you shipwrecked on the island?”

  “I wasn’t shipwrecked. I was marooned.”

  “Marooned? You mean someone deliberately left you there?”

  “Yes. Payne Roelt kidnapped me in order to get a hold on my father. He must have died before he told anyone where I was.”

  “The princess will be delighted to meet you. She loved your father very much.”

  “Do you know Princess Bronwyn?”

  “Yes, I know her as well as anyone, I suppose. We’re pretty good friends.”

  “But you’re a pirate!”

  “No, not really. Captain Basseliniden, the man you just met, he’s the pirate. This is his ship. I first met him a long time ago. In fact, I met him through the princess. He was in just the right place and at just the right time to rescue me and two friends of mine from the Baudad Alcatote.”

  “The Baudad of Spondula?”

  “The same. We were escaping from his harem.”

  “Sounds like one of my father’s stories!”

  “I suppose it does, at that. I’ll have to tell you all of the details later, maybe after you’ve met my fellow escapees, Thursby and Gravelinghe.”

  “You’ve read my father’s stories?”

  “Who hasn’t? I’ve even found some in the crew’s quarters on this ship! Practically falling apart they’ve been read so much.”

  The girl beamed and her smile was so radiant, so all-consuming that dirt and grime and dejectedness sloughed away from her like a snake’s skin. Rykkla realized, with something like surprise, that beneath the greasy, matted hair and in spite of the cracked lips and calloused feet, in spite of the bones protruding beneath undernourished flesh, in spite of the stiff, ragged, malodorous goatskins, there was a delicately pretty, almost elfin young lady.

  “Say,” suggested Rykkla, “why don’t we clean up a little before you make your début? I’m sure that I can find something more appropriate for you to wear, too. You’ll feel a lot better.” Too say nothing of improving your smell, she added to herself.

  “That sounds wonderful!”

  “As soon as you’re done eating, then.”

  Which was not as soon as Rykkla expected, since the girl’s skinny body was deceptively insatiable. She methodically disposed of more food than Rykkla could have consumed in a week before she finally declared herself satisfied. Rykkla ordered the cook to clear away what little débris remained and to bring soap and a bucket of hot water.

  The goatskins and the tattered, unidentifiable bits of her original clothing peeled away like the skin of a scalded tomato. Rykkla was appalled at the emaciated figure that was revealed. (Where did all of that food go?) Ribs, elbows, knees and hips protruded through skin that seemed as precariously thin as the fragile membrane of a balloon. She was certain that she could discern the girl’s spine between promising breasts as round and cheery as egg yolks. Tholance looke
d like a doll made of string and beads.

  Although the process must have been painful, Tholance made no protest at the vigorous scrubbing with cloth, brush and sponge to which Rykkla subjected her. When the process was completed, and after the cook had provided half a dozen additional pails of steaming water, Rykkla critically examined her handiwork. She had been right, she concluded, in her original estimation that deep within the unfortunate creature was in fact a young girl of blossoming beauty. With a little more nourishment, Tholance would be as fine-boned, graceful and translucent as a blown glass figurine. Her round face was dominated by eyes as large, shimmering and golden as a pair of crème caramels. Her complexion, still red and raw-looking from its scrubbing, held promise to be as fine-textured and cool as rose quartz. Her hair dried to a cloud of chocolate fluff that fell in weightless billows to her waist.

  “My goodness,” exclaimed Rykkla, “you’re certainly a very pretty young lady!”

  “Thank you very much!” Tholance blushed charmingly. “Papa always said that I favored my mother.”

  “There are clothes for you,” she indicated a pile of garments. “As soon as you’re dressed, we’ll get on with the introductions.”

  Thursby and Gravelinghe, as Rykkla had suspected, were immediately taken with the newcomer and cooed over the child nauseatingly, even the giantess, much to Rykkla’s infinite surprise. For her part, Tholance took to the two women as though they were newly-reunited sisters. She interrogated them mercilessly about their life in the Baudad’s harem and about the countries they had originally come from. It was not until Rykkla noticed that Tholance had procured paper and pencil from the captain and was busily taking notes while the others talked, that she realized that the girl was, indeed, her father’s daughter.

  Basseliniden, as Rykkla had suspected and expected, was not the least bit happy about his new passenger. The addition of three grown women to his crew had been difficult enough to deal with, now he was burdened with a veritable child, however adorable it may appear in its oversized sailor’s costume. That his men, rough, uncouth and illiterate though they may be, had adopted Tholance as a kind of mascot and acted toward her like a congress of maiden aunts only made matters worse. To see a burly sea-thug mash a thumb in a block and only murmur “Gosh darn it all, that sure hurt somethin’ fierce!” through clenched teeth, or to see Tuna Nose or Google Eye playing jacks or cooingly offering the girl handmade dolls sickened him.