A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter

by Ron Miller

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You mean little?”

  “Yes. But here, you’re actually only medium-sized.”

  “Yeah. I noticed that. It makes me feel kind of funny.”

  “I can imagine. The king makes you look like a baby. But don’t you think that this place is strange, too?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been outside the City before. Isn’t this right?”

  “Only in fairy tales, Thud.”

  “No one ever told me any fairy tales.”

  “Maybe you’re making up for lost time. Do you know where we can find the king? I’ve got a lot of questions to ask him.”

  “I guess I can ask.”

  “Please do. And that’s another thing, Thud: just how is it that you can speak the language?”

  “Why not?”

  “Can you speak it before?”

  “I don’t know. I never had to.”

  She suddenly stops the process of dressing herself. She realizes that she is still extremely hungry, more so than ever, in fact. She pulls off the trousers and climbs back onto the big bed. She explains her need to Thud, who speaks to someone at the door. Not too many minutes later there is a discreet knock and Thud admits a Kobold who is carrying a tray loaded with covered platters. Bronwyn squats cross-legged and allows the tray to be placed on the bed before her. She lifts the cover from one of the dishes.

  “What is this?” she asks, repelled by what is revealed.

  “Food,” answers Thud.

  “It looks more like something a cow coughed up.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “All right, then, what is it?”

  “Well, those things there, the grey things, they’re what-do-you-call-ems? The things that grow in wet, dark places?”

  “Mushrooms, I hope?”

  “That’s what they are, mushrooms!”

  “I know what mushrooms look like. That is fungus.”

  She lifts the other covers warily. There are things made from lichens, and it got much worse.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” offers Thud.

  “You’ve tasted this stuff?”

  “Maybe if you don’t look at it, it won’t seem so bad.”

  “It’s too late. I’ve already seen it.”

  Inquiry brought an invitation to join the king in his throne room early the next day. Bronwyn awakes that morning without the sense of urgency she ought to have felt. She is not feeling any of the hurry and bustle normally attendant on an immediate departure. She is already becoming accustomed to a subterranean existence; she has almost ceased to think of the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, houses or towns, in fact, about any of the terrestrial necessities. The artless unimagination of the Kobolds is like an hypnotic drug. She is certainly in the midst of more adventure than she had ever hoped to attain. If that indeed has been her goal, as she had once believed, why is she so anxious to move on? Why is she so keen on continuing toward her cousin’s camp? She is out of the palace, beyond the influence of Payne or her brother, in fact, they probably assume her to be dead. She is her own mistress now; an entirely new life is before her, if she wishes to begin it. Why then the compulsion to plunge back into the old one? As she dresses, she tries to puzzle it out.

  Perhaps Janos and Marishka has overestimated her...they has not reckoned on her pride, stubbornness and vindictiveness, to say nothing of her powerful sense of self-interest. Neither has she, if it comes to that. Not necessarily altogether commendable qualities, especially when taken in combination, she decides, but they are hers and people will just have to learn to deal with it.

  She finds herself angered beyond measure that her enemies are undoubtedly at this very moment gloating over her defeat and failure. And that is all the motivation she needs. She goes alone, accompanied only by a Kobold guide. She is left to wait in what she guesses to be an antechamber. It is already occupied by a small figure she recognizes immediately.

  “Henda!”

  The boy rises at the sound of her voice. In spite of his dolphin smile she knows that he is unhappy, as a blind man’s hands come to replace his eyes, Henda’s eyes have gained the ability to show all the emotion his mutilated, frozen face is denied expressing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He only shakes his head slightly.

  “But something is the matter?”

  Henda fumbles in his pockets for a moment, and pulls forth a stub of charcoal and a scrap of brown paper. He scribbles on it briefly, then hands the paper to the girl.

  “thar iz nuthin rong [says the note] i am afrade uv makin yu sad.”

  “‘Making me sad’? Why should you make me sad?”

  Henda retrieves the paper, but before he can form a reply, there is the sound of a huge gong and the doors in the end of the room open. Two Kobolds step forward through the door, and turn to escort Bronwyn and Henda into the throne room. The two humans follow them.

  The room beyond the door is a great chamber that Bronwyn catches herself thinking of as cavernous, but then, of course it is. It is not as large as many of the others she has been in, but it is certainly the most beautiful. She would have credited the Kobolds if she had not already known them to be incapable of such artistry. The vaulted roof is supported by buttresses of prismatic black basalt; crystals of every kind encrust the walls like fungi on a tree stump, but of sizes, colors and shapes that take Bronwyn’s breath away. She has not been a good student of geology and can identify by name little of what she sees, but she recognizes the glistening fool’s gold of iron pyrite: its intersecting cubes looks uncannily artificial and the golden crystals are a foot or more on a side; wine-colored tetrahedrons of amethyst each the size of her head, clusters like grapes; and sheets of delicate mica, like insects’ wings, that hang in curtains. There are incrustations of garnets and pendants of rutilated quartz grew from the ceiling like rock candy chandeliers. The same sourceless, phosphorescent light that illuminates the rest of the Kobolds’ world washes in incandescent, reticulated patterns over the surfaces, as though she were at the bottom of a sunlit pool with the Kobolds in the room looking at her as dispassionately as a school of goggle-eyed groupers. King Slagelse sits upon a raised dais at the center of the chamber, the sawed-off stump of a giant stalagmite, surrounded by a dozen or more of his Kobolds. Their round grey bodies looks like a collection of dinosaur eggs. No, not quite right. More like spider’s eggs in a jewelry box.

  “We welcome the Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy,” says the king politely.

  “Thank you, your, um, Highness. You’ve been very kind.”

  “The princess is now sufficiently rested and recreated? She has slept well and has eaten?”

  “Yes, your Highness. Physically I’m well enough, but I remain very confused. What is this place? I don’t understand at all where I am.”

  “Yes! All in good time! The princess will please trust us? First, we would like to introduce you to Thud.”

  Bronwyn blinks twice. Her friend isn’t anywhere in the room, so the king’s unexpected words simply do not make any sense to her. Nor has she any reply that makes better sense. Then she realizes that as the king is speaking, the man beside him has taken a half-step forward. It is he to whom the king has introduced her. The man is a man in fact: he is positively human, and, she notices with not a little consternation, almost supernaturally male. And he no more resembles the Thud she knew than he does Omar the Wonder Fish ‘her favorite storybook character when she had been a child). He does not appear to be tall, though that is mostly due to the giant Kobolds who surround him. He is in fact a full head taller than Bronwyn, whose own scalp is elevated to an even six feet when she wears sufficiently thick-soled shoes. He is spectacularly muscled; his body looks like a relief map of the mountains above them. That ruggedly fleshed topography looks to her like a sculptor’s rough sketch for an unfinished statue, carelessly hewn from an oak log by an adze. It possesses the flinty, chiseled leanness of musculature developed through hard
daily labor, rather than conscious, deliberate exercise. His arms and thighs are fasces of steel rods, his stomach as hard and rippled as a wave-lashed beach. Like everyone in the chamber save Bronwyn, he wears only an asbestos breechclout; Bronwyn finds herself unexpectedly, and surprisingly, stirred. Never before in her life, outside of artwork, and little enough Tamlaghtan art features nudes, given the Church’s constipated views about the human body, has she seen a naked male human being, and this man is within a very few, albeit significant, points of being as nude as a human can get. When she reluctantly moves her glance to the man’s face, she realizes with some shock and not a little distress that the quality of incompleteness is carried through here as well: looking into his eyes is like looking into a pair of clear glass marbles, she is willing to swear that she is looking right on through the back of his head. There is no more intelligence in them than if he actually were a statue of stone or wood.

  “Who is this?” she asks the king.

  “That is something it will take some time to explain. Does the princess truly wish to know?”

  “There are many things I’d like to know, your Highness. And if I have the time...”

  “Thud has told us something of the mission the princess has set for herself,” says the king, seeming to change subjects all too easily. “She has certainly gone through a lot of difficulty.”

  “It hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be.”

  “But what is?” offers the king. “It has been hard for us to truly appreciate the princess’ adventures, or to truly comprehend what would drive anyone to such extremes. So little changes here, she must understand, that change itself is forgotten. It is always the same. Always.”

  “I wish I can say the same for my world, your Highness.”

  “Can’t the princess? It would seem to us that the very world she came from is as changeless as this one.”

  “I don’t think your Highness understands.”

  “Do we not? We are not as ignorant of the surface world as the princess and her people are of ours. But we are not speaking of that large a scale, but rather only of the princess’ world, the princess’ personal one, the one the princess is fighting change to return to.”

  “No, I...”

  “We have gotten around more than the princess would believe. Our lives are not confined to the caverns and mines, at least not entirely. The people who live in the forests and mountains, and in the littlest, most remote villages, still leave milk by their hearths for us, just as they have done for countless generations. And we still accept these offerings, as we have done for equally countless generations. Their food truly is nothing to us: what are a few drops of disgusting milk or indigestible crumbs of cheese to our thousands? No, it is a contract that we are faithfully fulfilling. Has the princess read much of the folklore of her land? No? A shame; and she is wrong, if we may be so bold as to say so: they are not mere fairy-stories. There is so much to explain, then. Where to begin? Does the princess know the origins of her own race? First, would she care to sit? It is not necessary for her to stand in our presence.”

  “Forgive me, your Highness,” answers Bronwyn, a little coldly, “but if I stand it’s because I choose to. I’m not one of your subjects. I’m the daughter of a king, as you obviously know very well, and I’ll sit if and when I please.”

  She then takes one of the seats at the base of the dais. It was made for the scale of the Kobolds and made her feel like a doll, rather spoiling the effect of her speech.

  “Yes! Of course she can! Of course! She is quite right! We are very stupid; she will, of course, forgive our tactlessness?”

  Though the king’s expression is as changeless as Thud’s has always been, and as unreadable, Bronwyn now detects a subtle hardness in his speech, however pleasant and innocuous it remained. She wonders if perhaps she might not have made a mistake in her assertiveness.

  “Of course. It was rude of me to correct you. Your Highness had asked me a question?”

  “Yes. We are wondering what the princess knows of the origins of her own race?”

  “Well, the Book of Musrum tells us that He created the first people from rocks in a field, but I don’t know if I really believe that. It’s not what the natural philosophers say, anyway. They think we came from bugs and things.”

  “The princess must not be too quick to doubt. The story told by her people is not very far from the truth. It has only been retold from the peculiar viewpoint of the surface dwellers. Listen then: in the very beginning of time, Great Musrum created a race of near-gods, for He is very lonely. The princess can imagine the loneliness of a god who has all the infinite universe to Himself? Musrum created a race of giants, the Kobolds, to keep Him company. He gave us the safekeeping of the treasures of the richest of all the worlds in His universe. That is why we live underground, where we can be caretakers of Great Musrum’s wonderful minerals, His succulent ores, His graceful synclines and fluent anticlines...”

  “Pardon me,” interrupts Bronwyn, “but do you mean that you don’t do anything with all of that refining and...everything you do? I mean, what’re all the furnaces and things for? What do you do with all that metal and um, stuff?”

  “Oh, we certainly do something with it! We cleanse it and put it back!”

  “You bury it again?”

  “Of course. What else? What would we do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Sell it or something, I suppose. Or make things.”

  “For what? What for? But there is more to our story, if the princess will allow us. Many thousands of generations ago there is a kind of civil war among the Kobolds. There are renegades who are seduced by the sun, and other living creatures, creatures lower than the Kobolds who are the ideals of Musrum’s creation. Their eyes have been blinded by colors and they have an unnatural craving for open space. Their distorted minds can not stand the vaults that Musrum in His wisdom has created for our protection. They wickedly wish to abandon the stewardship He has entrusted to them.

  “The war went on for many years, but we will not burden the princess with its details. Suffice it to say that in the end, the renegade Kobolds, the insane ones, to be completely truthful, took upon themselves a self-imposed exile. They left the bosom of Musrum. They went outside, into the open. There the great sun burns them like coals in a furnace, shrinking them into cinders. With each generation they shrivel more, growing smaller and smaller, darker and darker. And the generations grew shorter as well, for the further they went from the true home, the less life they are able to draw from Great Musrum. They had to grow hair on their bodies, like the animals, for protection and warmth. Soon, the most distant generations forgot their origins in the struggle for existence on the outside of the world. It is a hard world out there, as the princess must surely know, not at all what Musrum meant for His people. He meant us to be here.”

  “Pardon me,” interrupts Bronwyn. “Is your Highness telling me that human beings descended from Kobolds?”

  “Well, of course!”

  “I have to admit it’s not the way I heard it.”

  “The princess interests us...we have never heard the story from a human’s point of view.”

  “Well, I’ve heard of Kobolds, of course; I told you that. It’s just that I’d never thought that you were anything real. I mean, I heard about you in stories, in, ah, fairy tales. Until now, I ‘d always thought that Kobolds wee make-believe, like fairies and giants and things.”

  “Humans have forgotten their origins, then,” the king says sadly.

  “Your Highness, I’m not too sure that we ever knew them. I mean, not the version you just told me. Not scientists and people who’ve studied such things for a long time. In school I learned that human beings have been around for millions of years, at least. At first they were just like big apes; they aren’t very smart, I suppose, though they painted pictures on the walls of the caves they lived in and they invented fire and discovered the wheel. We call these ancestors cave men.”

&n
bsp; “Well?”

  “What do you mean, ‘well’?”

  “Isn’t that just what we are telling the princess? Allowing for the distortions to be expected by the passage of time, and probably a natural jealousy, of course.”

  “No, the cave men are human enough. They are just big and lived in caves...” She let the argument drop, realizing that, indeed, the king has a certain point. “Well, look here,” she went on. “The cave men didn’t look anything like you Kobolds, not really. They were big, but not anywhere near as large as you, or even Thud for that matter. And they were all hairy and walked hunched over like this” ‘she demonstrates) “and they doesn’t know about metal or anything.”

  “It’s not a flattering picture the princess draws, but we do find it amusing. We suppose that we had expected the surface people to have remembered their origins and the True People better and perhaps with a little more reverence. Why else do the mountain dwellers leave little offerings for us, if the Kobolds are not being honored as Musrum’s chosen? But if we had truly thought about it, we might have expected this. It must be with great shame that humans look back on the gifts they have abandoned; they see their withered, scrawny bodies and remember the giants they once had been. It is no wonder that they have protected themselves with a special retelling of their creation, one that allows them to pretend to a little dignity, to imagine that they have risen rather than fallen.”

  “With all respect, your Highness...”

  “It is disappointing. We thought we would be better remembered. But perhaps it has been for the best, after all. By all accounts, humans have been toughened by having to live beyond Musrum’s care; they have become ambitious and powerful. It may be as well that most of them do not believe that we exist outside their children’s stories.”

  “I’m sure your Highness is right,” Bronwyn agreed, not only wondering where all of this madness was leading, but what the king’s intentions toward her really are. If being a little agreeable with the giant’s fairy tales helps to make him look upon her a little more kindly, she would gladly accept whatever he told her as gospel. This is not much better than a nightmare, she told herself, and as in any dream, good or bad, you went along with its rules.