A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist

by Ron Miller

  “I hope so.”

  “Did you mean what you says?”

  “When? What?”

  “That you’d like to stay here forever?”

  “It’s so tempting . . . everything’s so peaceful and gentle and beautiful.”

  “Then why not stay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  His hand bridges the short distance between them and, for the first time in all those weeks, touches her; his fingers cocoon themselves in her hair; he loosens them and the chestnut waves flow through, emulating the Wonthaggi as it frictionlessly passes around its obstacles.

  “You’re very beautiful, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “Surely you’ve been told before?”

  “Even if I had, why would I believe it?”

  “Would I lie to you?” he asks, seriously.

  “No, but your truth could be awfully biased.”

  “I’ll admit that, but has it occurred to you that my bias must have some basis?”

  “So?”

  He rolls until he arches over the princess, with one arm holding him over her, his face just above hers.

  “I do think I may be falling in love with you.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I know what I’d like you to say.”

  “I imagine I do too. I don’t know if I can, though.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, not just yet.”

  His face descends and his lips brush Bronwyn’s tentatively. A shiver descends her spine like an elevator whose cable had just slipped its moorings and she only says, “Mmm.” Pressing both his advantage and his lips, Mathias kisses the princess again and she not only allows it but encourages him. Her arms wrap around his neck and draws his face to meet her own.

  A few minutes later a pink and breathless princess sits upright and attempts to reorder disheveled hair and mind, the fussing buying her a little time to think.

  “There’s no hurry to do anything,” says the duke, rising to his feet. He offers his hands to the girl, saying, “Come. We’ll go back to the castle and meet the others for dinner.”

  They only have to walk a few yards to where their carriage had been left . . . their picnic paraphernalia would be taken care of by the invisible servants of whom they never give a thought. Bronwyn says little on the ride back to the city. She slumps into the corner of her seat where she can simultaneously watch both the road ahead and Mathias. The duke wisely does not try to draw her into conversation nor does he prattle to simply make talk; in fact, he barely looks at her; instead, he drives the team with a grin and a vivacity that accounts for volumes in themselves.

  My stars and little fishes! thinks the princess. What am I getting into? I know that weeks ago, when I first arrived, I wanted nothing better than to stay here where it’s so lovely and peaceful and where I’d be out of harm’s way. But now that it’s been offered to me, I just don’t know. I wanted to stay, and perhaps I still do, but now I think there’s been a price attached. Do I want to pay it?

  She looks at the duke, his square-jawed face looking like a brick of gold in the lowering sun.

  He’s the second most handsome man I’ve ever met; Musrum! It’s not fair to compare him with Gyven, but to fall in love with Gyven, even if I could do that, would be like falling in love with a god or a statue or, or a volcano. If Mathias falls a little short of the superhuman ideal that Gyven sets, he more than makes up for it by doing what Gyven would not possibly be capable of: caring for me. It’s so clear that Mathias would do anything for me. I don’t even have to ask: he seems to anticipate everything I want. So what do I want? Musrum! I know what he wants and what he’s hoping for, and life here with him would be so perfect . . . why don’t I just react to him, give him the encouragement he’s after?

  She could invent no answer to this last question.

  It is a quiet and thoughtful Bronwyn who arrives back at the castle just as dusk is turning the white buildings into a purple cluster of grapes. She thanked Mathias for the pleasant afternoon, politely but not with unnecessary warmth, and goes directly to her rooms. It is getting late and supper is approaching, so she washes and changes into her dinner clothes. She prepares herself in a mental silence that ignores everything not immediately occupied with her toilet. Yet, when she looks into her mirror, she discovers that she has been crying and is furious with herself.

  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 liza
rd’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 s
ilhouette 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.