A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist

by Ron Miller

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Who else would eat this kind of muck? Let me see the other jars.”

  “What’s in that one?”

  “Well, this one is fermented meat boiled in cream . . .”

  “Oh, Musrum.”

  “ . . . and this is oatmeal prepared in mineral oil.”

  “Ballast?”

  “Ballast,” he agrees.

  “That leaves us some bread, at least,” remarks Gyven, hopefully.

  “Where’s the airship?” asks Bronwyn. “Has anyone seen it?”

  “I’d almost forgotten about it,” says the baron.

  Eight eyes anxiously scans the stormy horizon.

  “I don’t see it,” says Bronwyn, and everyone agrees except Gyven, who says, “There it is!”

  “Where?”

  “There, above us!”

  “Musrum!”

  Not more than a quarter of a mile away is the fat spindle-shaped silhouette of the airship, perhaps a thousand feet above the level of the balloon. It is near enough that moving figures can be clearly seen.

  “How did it get so close so fast?”

  “When we are above the clouds, we must have been in a current that blew us in the direction from which we’d just come.”

  “Isn’t that just wonderful! “

  “It’s coming down!”

  The aeronef is gradually sinking to the level of the aerostat. It is clear that its crew is having difficulty managing their craft in the turbulent air: it is ponderously pitching, rolling, and yawing, like a whale asleep on the surface of a choppy sea.

  A fine mist begins to fall, partially obscuring the big dirigible and quickly soaking the balloonists. The atmosphere is as electrified as a Leyden jar and is actually humming under the tension.

  “What if we’re hit by lightning?” asks the baron. “The gas in the balloon will go up like a bomb!”

  “I know,” replies the princess. “That’s one of the things I asked about. Tudela said that atmospheric electricity would pass harmlessly over the surface of anything that didn’t come to a point. The balloon’s a sphere.”

  “You mean if we had a lightning rod attached . . .”

  “It would be a very bad idea.”

  There is a sudden, loud smack and a shower of splinters flies from the parapet of the basket.

  “What is that? Lightning?” asks Gyven.

  “No! They’re shooting at us!”

  The airship has dropped nearly to the level of the balloon’s car and a pair of marksmen are desperately trying to draw a bead from the pitching platform. Two or three holes appear in the side of the wicker basket.

  “They can shoot right through it!” cries Bronwyn. She suddenly feels a blow beneath her collarbone, as though someone had struck her chest with a ball peen hammer, and she falls back with a grunt. There is a hole in her jacket half an inch in diameter. With a shaking hand, she pulls back the lapel and looks beneath. A lead pellet the size of the tip of her little finger falls from between the layers of cloth. The bullet had spent most of its energy passing through the tough wicker of the basket, with only enough left to knock her down. She gingerly looks beneath her shirt; already a massive bruise is forming above her right breast.

  “Why’re they shooting at us?” asks the baron. “I can’t imagine your uncle having such a hostile change of heart about you.”

  “I’d doubt he gives those orders, or even knows about them.”

  “Who then?”

  “Probably the Church, acting under pressure from Payne and Ferenc.”

  “What would happen if they hit the balloon?” asks Gyven.

  “Not much,” answers Milnikov. “It would take a lot more than a few pinholes to let a couple hundred thousand cubic feet of gas escape.”

  “I wish we had a weapon!”

  “The baron has a revolver.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Use it, then!”

  “I don’t think it’ll do much good.”

  “It’ll give them something to think about.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Showing as little of himself as possible, the baron snaps off a few shots in the general direction of the dirigible balloon. The only effect is to increase the number of bullets returning to pierce the car.

  Meanwhile, the clouds have been coalescing around them like coagulating cream. A deep olive color, they seem to press down upon the horizon by their own weight. The atmosphere grows heavy with vapor, veiling everything but the two airships, like a curtain lowered onto a stage upon which some somber drama is about to be played.

  Bronwyn feels as saturated with electricity as with moisture. She is certain that if anyone touches her they’d be shocked.

  Suddenly, the curtain is torn apart, the vapor becomes incandescent and a shower of hailstones falls onto the balloonists. Each icy sphere detonates when it strikes with a flash of violet sparks. Lightning criss-crosses the sky in jagged flashes, weaving a basketwork of flame around the two helpless aircraft.

  “We’re doomed!” cries the baron.

  “No!” answers the princess. “They are! Look!”

  Beneath the aeronef hangs what appears at first to be a string of luminescent pearls, hundreds of tiny beads of sparkling light.

  “It’s working! It’s working!”

  “What? What’s working?”

  “Watch! Keep watching!”

  The dirigible seems to have become possessed by spirits; globes and tendrils of blue and green light drift and flicker over every surface. Bronwyn can clearly hear, even over the ceaseless thunder, the frightened cries of the airship’s crew. As the phosphorescent tail hanging below the airship grows brighter, sparks and flashing pinpoints of light begin to burst from every part of the gondola’s structure.

  What occurs next must have happened in a split second, though Bronwyn’s memory of it remains full of detail and incident. A bolt of lightning strikes at the tip of the dangling tail, as particularly as a bullwhip artist flicking a cigarette from the lips of his assistant. The tail explodes in a shower of white sparks; flames of every color burst from the airship’s gondola in plumes and arcs that bring an involuntary cry of appreciation from the princess, as though she were Ohhing and Ahhing a fireworks display. For a moment the doomed aircraft looks like a fiery pinwheel, then the giant envelope of inflammable gas explodes. A ball of clear blue flame boils into the turbulent sky; Bronwyn can feel the flash of heat. When her dazzled vision clears there is no sign of the aeronef.

  “You had something to do with that?” demands the awed baron.

  “I remembered what Tudela had told me, and what I’ve been reading. Before we took off, I gives the airship a lightning rod.”

  “How could you have known?”

  “Known what?”

  “Everything! That they’d chase us, that there’d be a storm, that they’d be hit by lightning!”

  “I didn’t know!”

  “Then why didn’t you simply set fire to the airship in its hangar and be done with it?”

  Before Bronwyn could answer, the wind, as though rushing into the space left by the vaporized dirigible, suddenly rushes at them with redoubled fury. The balloon spins like a top. The basket careens in every direction, threatening to spill its passengers into the void at any moment. Bronwyn and her friends grasp the interior frame of the basket and seek to entangle themselves into the ropework as best they can. The combined noise of the wind and thunder has passed beyond human hearing and, had a volcano erupted beneath them, they would not have heard it.

  The balloon is whirled away like a leaf in the midst of the tempest.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DELIVERANCE

  “Are we rising?”

  “On the contrary, we’re descending.”

  “Worse than that, we’re falling!”

  “I can’t tell if we’re going up or down!”

  “Up!”

  “Down!”

  “What’s that below us?”

/>   “Clouds.”

  “No, trees!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Look for yourself!”

  “Looks like clouds.”

  “Those are trees, I tell you!”

  “I think you’re right!”

  “There’s a lot of trees!”

  “An awful lot of them.”

  “It’s a forest!”

  “It’s getting closer!”

  “And much too fast. Throw out more ballast!”

  “We’ve thrown out all the ballast we had! There’s nothing left!”

  “We’re not more than five hundred feet from the treetops; we’ve got to lose more weight!”

  “There’s nothing more to throw out!”

  “Then we’re going to crash!”

  This argumentative conversation, while perhaps a little more interesting and certainly more animated than most, due to its unusual content, would nevertheless have attracted little attention from an eavesdropper had it not been for the fact that these words have been coming out of a dark, stormy sky; that is, from directly overhead. To the normally superstitious, this would have been uncanny enough. However, the stormy sky emitting this particular debate is that one presently above the fabled Dark Forest, a region where superstition is more than the norm: it is as vital a part of life as eating, breathing or burning witches.

  Two hundred miles to the northeast of Toth, and an otherwise progressive and enlightened nation, is a vast region of dense, virgin woodland known as the Dark Forest. It is all that remains of the great forests that once covered the entire northern two-thirds of the continent of Socotarra. It is divided into two lobes: a roughly circular area in Londeac covering more than thirty thousand square miles and a much larger area in the adjoining nation of Ibraila, with the two forests connected by a narrow isthmus . . in reality two distinct woodlands accorded unity by a botanical technicality.

  The Dark Forest is wild and almost wholly unpopulated, except for a few poor, sparsely populated hamlets hugging its perimeter. Its trees are huge and of uncalculated antiquity, some so large that comfortable homes have been carved out of individual trunks. The circumferences of the smallest cannot be encircled by the joined arms of half a dozen men, and a team of Percherons is required to haul even one of the smaller branches from the forest. The labor of felling one of these lesser trees, cutting it into manageable segments and delivering it to either one of the region’s mills might be the work of months.

  A stranger wandering in the midst of the Dark Forest might think himself in the abandoned streets of some cyclopean city: one of tall, fluted, terra cotta buildings, umber and sienna, both burnt and raw, their highest stones and most distant streets lost in an encompassing and never-ending gloom. Scores of yards separate the giant trees; an army could advance through the forest with rank and file scarcely impeded. The ground between the trees is a soft cushion, fathoms deep, of a humus black, rich, fragrant and peaty. Feeble virgae of sunlight struggle through a hundred feet of thick foliage, so heavily filtered that the illumination becomes more like a fine luminous dust that coats the forest floor in a shadowless half-light; the air itself appears to be softly phosphorescent. No underbrush grows in the light-starved interstices with the result that the forest floor is curiously barren and tidy. The deep interior is like a subterranean world: a vast, cool, silent cavern whose dark vaults are supported by immense, patient columns. Scant hundreds of feet above, on the far side of the dense canopy, impenetrable as the crust of the earth, is an alien world of light, sound and color.

  The Dark Forest is rich in animal life, refugees from the denuded remainder of Socotara, living there in a kind of primordial and ignorant bliss. Deer are abundant, as are wolves of a preternatural size, ferocity, strength and intelligence. Immense elks with bodies like shaggy hogsheads, haughty demeanors and racks like the fossilized wingspreads of extinct condors. Wild boar, armed with razored tusks, like vain Peigambarese sporting their scimitars, menacing the forest in their half-blind ill humor. Wolverines, badgers and foxes; stoats, minks, ferrets, sables and others of the slinkier class of mammals. Hundreds of varieties of rodents: beavers, mice, rats, lemmings, jerboas, porcupines, chinchillas, capybaras, gophers, rabbits, hares, squirrels and chipmunks, to say nothing of an entire underclass of shrews and moles. There are birds and reptiles, insects and spiders, some amphibians but practically no fish. There are no people. Or, to be strictly accurate, there are no human beings.

  At the moment that voices are coming from the sky, the Dark Forest is in the grip of a violently cyclonic storm. Above the treetops powerful winds seemed to be stirring lightning, thunder and clouds into a nightmarish porridge. The denizens of the forest, however, are as unperturbed by this violence as deep-sea fish might be by a hurricane. Except for a distant, muffled sound, like surf heard from the far side of some dunes, and a soft rain of torn leaves, there is little sign that all is not as calm and changeless as ever. Above the sheltering treetops, however, is chaos. The great, normally level deck is heaving and churning like a gale-tossed sea. The fifty feet or more above that thrashing surface is a lacerating maelstrom of twigs, branches, limbs and leaves.

  “We can’t go down into that!”

  “We’d be torn to pieces!”

  “We have to get higher!”

  “Find something to toss out. Anything!”

  “Here, I don’t need this coat and hat.”

  “Excellent, Thud! I don’t need mine, either.”

  Four sets of coats and hats are snatched by the wind, and flutter away like bats.

  “Are we going up?”

  “I can’t tell, Princess. The wind is battering us too much.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Throw out boots, ropes, anything you can find!”

  “I’m practically naked now, Gyven!”

  “Would you rather be dead?”

  “There! That make any difference?”

  “No! We’re still descending!”

  “Baron! What about the basket?”

  “What?”

  “We can cut away the basket! It must weigh hundreds of pounds.”

  “Are you crazy. Bronwyn? We’d be killed for sure!”

  “No, no! If we climb up onto the load ring, we can cut away the ropes holding the basket.”

  “Up there?”

  “Better than down there!”

  “I suppose you’re right. We’d better hurry, then.”

  Four shadowy figures clamber onto the heavy, wooden ring, where they cling precariously. Passing their last precious knife from hand to hand, they sever all of the thick ropes from which the basket hangs. It drops away, spinning, and in a moment they see it strike the treetops, exploding in a spray of wicker and twigs, before the wreckage is swallowed up.

  “That might have been us!”

  “Are we rising?”

  “Yes, Gyven! Look!”

  The balloon has rebounded from the loss of the basket’s weight like a ball bouncing from a cement pavement. The roiling treetops recede into the darkness.

  “We’re saved!”

  “Yes!”

  “No! Look!”

  The forest canopy is visible again and rapidly approaching.

  “We’re lost!”

  The remnant of the balloon is soon brushing the tops of the trees. The refugees cling to their perch while being flailed by flying debris as thoroughly as any penitent could have wished. Our waifs, however, consider themselves more sinned upon than sinners, so the enforced penance seemed entirely unjust. The balloon, reduced from its original taut sphericity to a fluttering, half-inflated bag, leaps from treetop to treetop in ponderous bounds like a lunatic whale, twisted this way and that by the howling, capricious gale. Its passengers can barely hear one another above the din of crashing limbs, shrieking wind and thunder that abuse their ears as though someone were shaking a huge sheet of tin next to their heads.

  “Princess, how much do I weigh?”

  “What, Thud
?”

  “How heavy am I?”

  “How’m I supposed to know?”

  “Baron, how heavy am l?”

  “Is this an appropriate subject of conversation, Thud?”

  “Doesn’t anyone know?”

  “All right. I’d be surprised if you weighed less than five hundred pounds.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “Yes, that’s a lot.”

  “Good.”

  “Thud! What are you doing? Don’t!” But that scream is torn from Bronwyn’s lips, as lost to the wind as is the big man.

  “Thud!”

  “Princess! Don’t!” cries Gyven, grasping Bronwyn around the waist with an arm he can scarcely spare. His grip on the struggling girl is broken by the crash of the balloon into the treetops. It is the final blow. The balloon expels the last of its gas in a defeated sigh, like a bludgeoned elephant. The wreckage plunges into the wildly churning canopy. The princess, Gyven and the baron find themselves in a tumbling confusion of tangled netting and foliage. Their bodies, ill protected because they had abandoned their heavy coats and high boots, are beaten and scratched by the flagellating claws of flailing branches, their remaining clothing and skin being indiscriminately reduced to rags and tatters.

  As the last of its gas escapes from a hundred rents, the collapsed envelope of the balloon becomes a massive dead weight. Still bearing its fragile cargo within its folds, the seven hundred and fifty pounds of rubberized linen plummets through the trees like a locomotive through a haystack. The confused mass dangles for a moment from the massive lower branches, brown, wrinkled and pendulous, like a huge cocoon or the scrotum of some elderly, cosmic bull, before breaking free, falling unopposed the remaining seventy-five or one hundred feet and landing with a prolonged, muted reverberation on the resilient forest floor.

  The silence, momentarily broken, slowly flows back like a bowl of molasses healing the removal of a spoonful.

  There is no movement from within the crumpled envelope.

  A very long time passes.

  The dust raised by the fall settles, the sound is absorbed by the anechoic labyrinth, the last of the debris flutters wanly or quickly, depending upon mass and cross-section, to the ground and curiosity briefly returns to a thousand startled, frightened eyes. There still is no movement from within the envelope.