A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter

by Ron Miller

  “Well, ah, thank you, ah, your Highness.”

  “This is our kingdom.” He wavs a hand in wide gesture. “The princess is in it now.” All she sees is the room they stood in; she is sure he must mean more than that. “I don’t understand you. This is Tamlaght. I haven’t left it.”

  “The princess left Tamlaght the moment she stepps beneath the ground.”

  “Well, I won’t argue the point now...But the name of this kingdom?”

  “Name? We are not certain what the princess means. Our kingdom 149 Palaces & Prisons has no name.”

  “Do please go on.”

  “Our kingdom is far, far older than the princess’ own. It is old when the house of Slagelse was founded one hundred and thirty-three generations ago and the princess must understand that we are very long-lived.”

  “Who are you, then? And, I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to put this: What are you?”

  “We are a Kobold, these gentlemen here are Kobolds, our kingdom is of the Kobolds.”

  “Kobolds? I have heard of such things...you, I mean...but only in fairy tales, in stories.”

  “Really? We know that our people are known to the surface dwellers who live on the mountains above our kingdom but, between the princess and ourselves, we do not believe they are very intelligent representatives of her race. They would believe anything. It is very gratifying to learn that someone of relative education and breeding knew of us.”

  “Well, I’d heard of Kobolds, of course, but I can’t honestly say I believed all that I was told.”

  “No matter, no matter! We know that the princess is anxious to be reunited with her friend?”

  “Thud? Yes, very much! I thought he was dead.”

  “We are sorry about that, we really are. We had no idea that the two of you were in any way connected, not until we spoke to Thud. It is quite a surprise, the princess can believe us, to learn that one of our own has become so intricately involved in a convoluted upper-world intrigue.”

  “Now that you mention it, that’s something I would like the answer to before I see Thud...Why do all of you look like him? And what do you mean, ‘one of our own’?”

  “Why, because Thud’s a Kobold, of course.”

  Before Bronwyn can close the mouth that has involuntarily dropped open, there is a knock at the door and the king calls out, “Enter!”

  And there is Thud, flanked by two Kobolds. He is still wearing the long fur coat, though by now it looks as though it is well into its last molting season. With a glad cry, Bronwyn runs to her friend, who engulfs her in his massive arms.

  “I’m awful glad to see you, Princess,” he says, but Bronwyn can say nothing. She finally stands back a step, so that she can look up into Thud’s face. She wipes away some of the wetness on her face and says, laughing, “I thought you were dead!”

  “I thought I was too, Princess. I thought the whole mountain had fallen on me.”

  “That was our doing,” interjected the king. “The sinkhole is one of our few accesses to the surface and we guard it carefully. We knew outside people were coming, but can the princess imagine our surprise when it was reported that one of our own was in mortal peril?”

  “It must have been a shock.”

  “It was, indeed! Well, it was simplicity itself to arrange the landslide and rescue Thud.”

  “Simplicity itself.”

  “Everything went black,” added Thud, “and I woke up here.”

  “I think everything is going black again,” says Bronwyn, who suddenly sits down. Waves of nausea and dizziness are washing over her like an oily surf.

  “Oh dear!” cries the Kobold king. “What is the matter?”

  Thud gently picks the princess up and carries her to a variety of couch. He stretches her out at full length upon it, but as soon as he steps away, the girl turns her head over the edge and vomits. She retches violently but only a thin drool splashes onto the floor. She drops her head limply back onto the cushion.

  “What is wrong?” asks the king.

  “I think she’s just hungry,” answers Thud.

  “Well, I am now,” adds the princess, weakly.

  “Of course! How can we be so remiss? No visitors in a century and one’s skills as a host completely vanish. How can the princess forgive our thoughtlessness?”

  Before she can answer, he rapidly issues orders to the two Kobolds who had accompanied Thud. Spoken in his own language, the words made him sound like a gravel crusher. For all Bronwyn knew, he was crushing gravel. The Kobolds hurry from the room. Only a few minutes pass before they return, one carrying a bowl of something liquid and steaming, the other carrying a large brown bundle.

  “Can you take care of this?” asks the king of Thud, indicating the bowl of food. Thud nods, takes the bowl and squats beside the semiconscious girl. He lifts her head a few inches and holds a spoonful of thin, grey broth up to her mouth. He presses the rim against her lips and she takes a little of the food. He waits for a minute in taut suspense, but the soup stays put. He ventures another spoonful with equal success. Emboldened, he begins feeding her in earnest.

  “We found this in the pool,” says the king, as he directs his Kobolds to open the bundle. A mass of sodden fabric erupts from it, spilling messily to the floor. “Does this belong to the princess?”

  “Yes,” answers Thud, “those are her clothes. Can they be dried? She shouldn’t put them on wet.”

  “Oh, certainly. Spootka, Stradool, take these to the smeltery. See that they are made dry.”

  The two Kobolds thus addressed scoop up the clothing and hurry from the room. The king turns once more to Thud.

  “Do you think it is damp enough here for the princess?”

  “I don’t think that damp is good for her, your Majesty.”

  “No? Really? Are you sure?”

  “Too much damp makes people sick.”

  “How strange. Well, that is remedied easily enough. There are dry rooms near the furnaces that are otherwise very nice. The princess can have any one of them; no one else will take them. We will see that they are properly furnished; do you know what else the princess may need?”

  “Well, your Majesty, she’s wet, cold, tired, dirty and hungry. She ate some food, and she’s sleeping, so that takes care of, uh, two things.”

  “Do you think the princess can be moved?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure.”

  “Good. We will order a room to be made ready now. We only hope that we can make up for such a poor introduction to our kingdom. We will need her to feel friendly toward us.”

  The ominousness of that final sentence was too subtle for Thud to notice.

  When Bronwyn awakes, it seems that little has changed. She is still in a room built to the bosnian proportions of her hosts. Hosts, indeed! The walls are a fine-grained pale stone, finished as smooth as plaster. They are innocent of any decoration. The Kobolds seem to be thoroughly innocent of any art. The room is equipped with the same sort of strange, half-melted-looking furniture she had seen before. The bed she is in is large enough for a dozen humans. Though its mattress is barely resilient, she had slept comfortably enough. There are four towering corner posts: vast stalagmites left in their natural state, like enormous pink candles veined with rose and lavender. Lying near the edge of the bed on her right is a momentary mystery: a small beige globe something like a cantaloupe, she thinks it might be her breakfast until she recognizes it as the top of Thud’s head. The big man had fallen asleep sitting in the chair next to her and had toppled over onto the bed. Poor man! This is the second time I’ve caused him to sleep in a chair. Poor man, indeed, she thinks, then: is Thud a man? Or what? She reaches over and touches the pink sphere with a finger tip and Thud is instantly awake, sitting erect and looking at her with his customary emotionlessness.

  “Good morning, I think,” he greets her.

  “‘Morning’ will do as well as anything,” she answers, stretching. “Ow! Every muscle in my body feels like it’s t
he wrong size. Rigor mortis has set in. I feel like a pile of old coat hangers. And Musrum! I’m hungry!”

  “You can have food brought here anytime you want. All you have to do is ask.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Oh, yes. I ate plenty even before you came here. But you haven’t eaten much at all. Just a little soup.”

  “You don’t have to tell me!”

  She crawls to the side of the bed, swings her feet over the edge and pushes herself upright.

  “Ohh!” She clutches her head. “I feel terrible. Oh, Musrum! and I’m still in the same clothes. I must smell as bad as I look. Phoo! I do!”

  “I would’ve washed you, but you seemed too sick. I’m sorry. I thought you needed to sleep.”

  “Let me do my own thinking for a minute...I don’t know what I want first: a bath or breakfast. A bath, I think, I’m sure, definitely.”

  “They found a pack, the one you must’ve dropped in the pool.”

  “Wonderful! I can change clothes, then; where are they?”

  “I don’t know. They took them to dry somewhere. I can find them for you if you want.”

  “I wish you would. And where am I supposed to take this bath?”

  “I don’t know. I can ask someone.”

  “You can speak their language?”

  “Sort of. It’s funny. I doesn’t think I knew any foreign languages.”

  He goes to the door, opens it and speaks quietly to someone standing just outside.

  “Your clothes are coming,” he reports when he turns back into the room, “and someone’ll take you where you can have a bath.”

  “Where’s Henda? I haven’t seen him since he led me here.”

  “I don’t know, Princess. I haven’t seen him at all. I didn’t know he was here. I can ask.”

  “Would you, please?”

  There is a discreet rapping at the door. At Bronwyn’s bidding a Kobold enters. Until that moment, Bronwyn had never considered the biologically necessary presence of female Kobolds, and she has never in her life imagined anything like the creature who stood patiently waiting for her. Thud with teats, she thinks, inadequately. Even “udders” seems insufficient to describe the pendulous masses that hang like half-filled sacks of grain to the female Kobold’s vast waist. Either one must weigh as much as I do. Amazing. She notices that with the exception of Slagelse, all Kobolds apparently dress exactly alike. Unfortunately, she adds unkindly.

  “It’s Sligool,” says Thud.

  “It’s what?”

  “She’s your bath attendant.”

  “She’s what?”

  “She’ll take you to the baths. Just follow her. I’m sure it’s all right.”

  Bronwyn has only taken a single step beyond the threshold of her door when she freezes, struck as dumb as though she were eyeball to eyeball with a furious basilisk. In the Great Temple of Musrum, in Blavek, is a magnificent painting by the legendary artist Ludek Lach-Szyrma. It covers an entire wall of the East ‘or Iron Gate) Chancel and when seen from the proper distance, fills one’s vision like an overflowing cup. It is an apocalyptic recreation of the Musrumic Hell, the Realm of the Weedking, and few can stand before it unmoved by its beauty and horror, its glamour, seduction, savoriness; its monstrousness, succulence and damnation. Flames like phosphorescent tentacles stroke and relish the roiling black clouds that pours from hissing, sparkling furnaces. The smoke greases the bilious sky with oily smears; green and violet beams of light weave through it like ribbons. A shattered city, ragged and black as the Weedking’s teeth, is silhouetted against the licking ember of His glowing tongue. Lambent coals radiating within the empty sockets of windows turn the buildings into squinting, baleful dragons. Over and through the carbonized city scuttle thousands of pale, glistening workers, their white bodies as taut and round as fish eggs. They are the furnace men, the stokers, the smelters, without whom the fires of the Weedking’s realm would dwindle to sour ashes. On their backs, in wagons and in carts they carry the endless supplies of coal and peat and dung that feed the hot-blooded, hungry Weedking.

  And that is what Bronwyn sees before her, more or less. She later wonders if Lach-Szyrma has somehow stumbled into the Kobolds’ world, taking back to the Church-smothered Tamlaght of three centuries ago a vision of Hell. There are some differences: where the artist had seen horror, there is industry; where he had seen chaos, there is metamorphosis; where he had seen the curse of Musrum, there is single-mindedness and bland contentment. Where Lach-Szyrma had seen Hell, Bronwyn sees the mills and forges of the Kobolds.

  Seen from her vantage point, a wide ledge perhaps seventy-five or a hundred feet above the floor of the main cavern, the Kobold refinery looks like the Transmoltus at night. The naked Kobolds are not the horrifying monsters of Lach-Szyrma’s nightmare, but they make Bronwyn’s head spin with metaphors. The white giants looks like hairless bison; in their purposeful industry, they look like termites; splashed with livid colors from the furnaces, they look as sinister as circus clowns at midnight, or gods at their forges smelting planets, or demons pan-frying the damned. The mural in the Church had scared her into nightmares for a week when she had first seen it more than ten years before, and its frightfulness has never been forgotten, exactly as its author intended. She knew the memory would never allow her to see the Kobold works without prejudice, that she would never see the beauty there without the superimposition of Lach-Szyrma’s fundamentalist horrors. She finds herself saddened by this and not a little angry.

  She is eventually led by way of a dark and circuitous route to a large chamber, its stalactite-festooned ceiling barely visible forty feet overhead, the distant walls invisible in the thick, white vapors that rise from hundreds of bubbling, circular pools. She is led in a winding path between the thermal springs, their superheated water crackling and fizzing like champagne.

  Some of the springs are only navel-like holes in the wet, rocky floor, hissing and sputtering like teakettles; others are fuming lakes, the centers of which would suddenly heave upwards in glassy domes as their subterranean plumbing belched. The air is oppressively humid and as thick as soup. Bronwyn finds herself gasping for breath in an atmosphere that feels like a wet blanket draped over her head.

  They finally came to a halt before a vast pool, its rim raised five feet above the floor of the cavern, like a lunar crater, the glass-like water level with the edge. With gestures the Kobold ‘Koboldette? Koboldess?) clearly indicated that this is The Place. Bronwyn gingerly touches the wet stone, but it isn’t hot. The water that trickles in a shimmering film over the rim is blood-temperature, the pool can be but only a little hotter, she hopes. She has been afraid that the Kobolds might unthinkingly parboil her.

  As the female empties a bag of soaps, towels, jars and bottles, Bronwyn strips herself of her clothing. She has not has it off for at least three days, and it feels as though it is taking skin with it. Then a problem presents itself. Her first effort at climbing the nearly vertical rim lands her on the floor of the cavern. The travertine wall that the spring has gradually built around itself is as slippery as a wall of ice. There are neither crevices nor angles to give purchase to bare feet and fingers. She tries several places, at grave risk to both limb and dignity, before her attention is caught by Sligool. The huge female locks her fingers together, palms up, and leans over, letting her long arms dangle. Bronwyn steps into the stirrup thus made and before she knows what is happening finds herself launched into the air like a stone from a slingshot. At the descending end of her parabola she drops into the spring, arms and legs flailing, with a graceless splash.

  The water is wonderful. It is slightly warmer than body heat and its surface is alive with curling tendrils of steam. The pool’s crater is infundibular and bubbles drift up like fireflies from its narrow purple throat. They tickle as they roll over the impeding island of her body, like curious minnows swarming around a whale. Am I still in the cirque dreaming this fantasy in a hypothermic coma? Will it all go black in a moment w
hen I die of exposure and exhaustion? Or have I died, and discovering now what a whimsical god Musrum is? The Kobold holds a cylindrical bar of soap at the rim of the pool and Bronwyn drifts over to take it, along with a square of fuzzy, abrasive cloth. She quickly foregoes the latter; she’d let the Kobolds scrub with sandpaper if they wished. Although it is a little clumsy, bathing while floating free, especially for such an indifferent swimmer as Bronwyn, she finally finishes, hair and all. She paddles to the edge of the spring, and Sligool lifts her from the water like a boiled dumpling. The princess allows herself to be rubbed and anointed with several headily aromatic oils and salves, as amazed with Sligool as she had been at Thud for his gentleness. To look at them, Bronwyn wouldn’t have trusted a Kobold with anything more fragile than a brick.

  The firm massaging recreates muscles, untying them from complicated knots and manipulating them into their proper places. Wrapped in a tent-like towel of the Kobold’s cardboard-like fabric, she pads barefoot behind the woman as the Kobold leads the way back to the princess’ chamber.

  There she finds Thud waiting with the clothes she has carried in the pack, now dry and neatly laid out on the bed. She is especially delighted to see the pair of thick woolen blankets that Janos had given her. She chooses trousers and a soft flannel shirt from the collection. As she dresses, she says, “Thud, do you have any idea at all about where we are?”

  “The king says we’re in his kingdom.”

  “Well, yes; but where is that?”

  “Right here.”

  “You don’t find any of this strange?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well, I mean, for example, you look like all of these, um, people.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Well, look, I don’t know how to put this, but haven’t you ever feel, well, ah, different? I mean, look how big you are, for instance.”

  “Oh that.”

  “Where we came from, everyone looks like me, more or less, isn’t that right?”

  “Naw. You’re real pretty.”