A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter

by Ron Miller

  So far her hate for Payne Roelt and her brother has brought death and disaster to everyone to whom she had turns for help, even to this innocent animal. Only three more days and the coronation of her brother would take place, and Payne Roelt would rule Tamlaght. It has been, to the present date, only eighteen days since she stole the letters from Ferenc’s desk, two and a half weeks that might as well be as many months. Decades seem to separate the Princess Bronwyn of Tamlaght from the dreary, helpless creature that now huddles, shivering and alone, more lost and vulnerable than even the smallest chipmunk, shrew, bird or frog. They are home already; they know where they are, fat and well lardered for the winter. The little bastards.

  So what to do, then? Obviously the plan to follow the direction of the ridge is no longer practical. She realizes now that it had not been a very practical plan from the beginning. Cutting across the innumerable watercourses is slow, laborious and dangerous enough with the horse to carry her. Now it is simply impossible. The only thing for her to do now is to follow the next stream she strikes until she finds any habitation at all, where she would seek succor of the first people she would meet. Or face arrest, if it comes to that. She takes from the horse and its saddlebags what few things look useful. There is the revolver, of course, one of those she had purloined. At the bottom of one bag is a cardboard carton containing twenty-five rounds for the cannon-like 50mm Minch-Moappa semi-recoilless Army Special. Unfortunately there is no holster for it and she has to carry the heavy gun wedged beneath the straps wound around her blanket. There is a smallish folding knife and a tin cup. There is neither extra clothing nor gloves. She has a cavalry saber and knee-high riding boots, though she doubts the latter’s efficiency in hiking. Other than a few lengths of twine and some leather straps, there is nothing else of use she can take with her.

  For the first week of her sojourn, rivers and streams had been an obstruction that arrived every quarter of a mile or so, but now that she is looking for one, it is almost a full day before she again stands at the brink of a foaming cascade. Turning to her left, she follows the tumbling water downstream. Although she has had plenty of water, too much, in her opinion, the princess has not eaten any solid food in nearly half a week. At night her stomach feels like an angry fist shaking rebelliously at an inattentive administration. During the day she has to rest too often, and even the slightest exertion leaves her weak and dizzy. She realizes that she needs to find something to eat soon or she might as well curl up and die right where she is. But what is there to eat? she wonders. I am well aware that a forest should be literally alive with food; but how can I find it? How can I identify it? How would I know what is safe? How can I kill it? What do I have to do to it once it is dead, whatever it is? How am I to cook it? Insurmountable questions.

  She sleeps beside the stream, which is growing broader and less swift as the land almost imperceptibly levels. After awakening one morning, she kneels beside a still pool in the bank to wash the sleep from her face. Floating in the water is a mat of bright green, circular leaves, each tiny pad smaller than her little fingernail. On an impulse she scoops up a handful and sucks the mass into her mouth. She chews cautiously; the plants have a slightly bitter, grassy flavor that is not at all objectionable. She eats another two handfuls and then sits back on her haunches to reconsider the problem of food. She begins a systematic search of the area immediately surrounding her campsite. Right alongside the pool is a pale green reedy plant. She gathers a half dozen, breaking them off where their stems join a small bulb at the base. The green tubes immediately begin to leak a milky fluid that, she thinks, looks nutritious enough. She sucks on the broken ends, chewing at the stringy stalk, and instantly her mouth begins to burn. At first it is merely mildly astringent, and no more distressing than strong pepper. But the burning increases. Distressed, she flings the stalks from her and begins scooping handfuls of water from the pool, trying to wash the acid from her mouth. Waves of nausea begin to churn at the back of her throat. She vomits violently. Then she vomits again, and then once more.

  Long minutes later, she lay prone at the edge of the pool, one cheek resting in the icy water; a thread of mucus drooling from the corner of her mouth traces circular patterns on the swirling surface. She is weak and her alimentary canal feels as though it has just been stamped flat, but the burning is virtually gone and the nausea has passed as quickly as it has come. The pale green stalks are unquestionably a plant to avoid.

  There is no point in delaying a search for more food. She has to eat. Her next discovery is considerably more pleasant: a cache of pine cones that had collected in a rocky hollow. From them she is able to shake loose a double handful of small, rich nuts that taste delicious. Emboldened, she looks around with a more critical eye. She knows better than to attempt to eat any mushroom she might find, but then she also knows that there is one variety so distinctive that it is impossible to confuse it with any other. She finds two of them, half-buried beneath a blanket of the leaves they so nearly resemble in color. They are a pair of large morels that remind her of bath sponges. Breaking off chunks of the cake-like fungus, she savors the nutty flavor.

  For nearly a week the princess lives on what little she finds in the forest. She avoids most green plants ‘though she does find a patch of wild onions, which she identifies by their odor), what few are remaining after the long frosts of autumn. While there are no berries or fruits, there is an abundance of nuts and she has no qualms about eating those. And once she found by accident what must have been the cache of some unlucky rodent. She shamelessly looted the hard-won and painstakingly gathered harvest of nuts and dried berries. Once she discovered a half-dozen small mussels clinging to a rock in the stream. She ate them raw after prying them loose and cracking the shells open with the butt of her revolver. Still, it isn’t much. It is not even remotely enough. The princess is constantly hungry, the hunger an unending pain. She is growing weaker almost by the hour as her starved body feeds upon itself. As the stream leads her into flatter countryside, the forest becomes abruptly thinner. Centuries of logging have replaced the massive towers she has grown accustomed to with second-growth trees that seem almost insubstantially reed-like by comparison. Without the shade of large trees, the undergrowth, encouraged by its access to sunlight, is becoming progressively thicker. To make any progress at all, Bronwyn is forced to stay close to the banks of the stream. With trees now small enough for her to circle their trunks with one hand and the space separating them filled with an almost impenetrable tangle of sere, leafless shrubbery and weeds, Bronwyn’s source of nuts and morels quickly vanishes.

  After a long day in which the undergrowth has crowded her into wading the icy water of the stream several times, a day in which she has covered scarcely half a dozen miles, hot, tired, laced with scratches from thorns and needles, the princess finds herself starving and once again without resources. She turns to the stream once again in the hope of discovering more mussels. Now that she has entered relatively flat country, she knows the coast can not be too many days’ journey away.

  The stream has become a broad, relatively shallow river, its pebbly bottom visible all the way across. She searches but can not find any of the shellfish, the stones, being far too small to support them. Turning over a mossy rock, however, she discovers a family of crayfish. She easily plucks them from the water. When she has a dozen wriggling on the bank beside her, she settles down to eat. Finished, she idly tosses one of the empty carapaces into the stream, if for no other reason than to see how far it will go. When one of the tiny corpses strikes the turbulent surface, she is surprised to be rewarded with a sudden splashing where the fragment landed. Idiot! Why hasn’t it occurred to me before that there must be fish in the stream? She has a considerable length of string to use as line, and she has already been given evidence of the efficacy of the crustaceans as bait. She only lacks a hook. After a short search she finds a bush whose wood seems fairly tough. With her knife, she cut a few inches from a twig. Sitting on the ground,
she removes one of her boots and, again using the knife, prizes a nail out of the heel. She splits one end of the twig and inserts the nail, its pointed end angled toward the opposite end of the stick. With a piece of twine she tightly binds the split. She now has a piece of wood about two inches long with a pointed piece of iron jutting from it, rather like a check mark or an angular J. Splitting the opposite end, she inserts one end of the longest piece of string, once again binding the string into the split tightly. She now has a line and hook. She impales a piece of crawfish onto the nail as bait. She tosses the improvised tackle as far as she can into the stream, but the current swings the line until the baited nail comes to rest against the bank. She tries several times to throw the line further into the water, but no matter how far it goes, it still ends up in the shallow water on the shore. Hauling in her line in frustration, she leaves it coiled on the bank while she goes in search of something that will help her to keep the hook well out into the stream. After a few minutes she finds a sapling an inch or two in diameter and almost fifteen feet tall. She whittles away at its base until she fells the young tree. Its few branches are easily stripped away. Dragging the resulting long pole back to her fishing site, she ties one end of her string to the top end of the sapling. She wedges the larger end into a crevice between some rocks, arranging it so that the pole is supports while leaning over the water at a shallow angle. She tosses the baits hook back into the stream and is pleased to see the line stretch out parallel to the bank, some dozen feet from the shore.

  ‘It is understood that the preceding may seem unnecessarily detailed to the reader, but the Princess Bronwyn is quite rightly proud of these accomplishments and the description of them has been elaborated at her request.)

  She finds a comfortable place to rest and wait, confident that it should not take very long to hook a fish. She is not wrong. After only a few minutes, the line begins to jerk, the water splashing where the string enters the stream. At this point, Bronwyn notices a minor error in her device: she has not made any arrangement by means of which a captured fish can be retrieved. Rather than go to all the tedium of taking in the long pole, with the strong possibility of losing the fish, she wades into the icy water. Following the line until it meets the stream, she raises the struggling animal out of the water.

  It is a big trout, weighing several pounds, and she feel extremely proud of her capture. She lets it flop to its death on the rocks while she rebaits and recasts the line. Bronwyn then comes face to face, as it were, with having to eat the fish. She had been angling with her cousin Piers on the ponds and lakes that decorate the royal properties, and had been more or less a witness when he cleaned the fish they had caught. But in those times, they has grilled the fish over hot coals and accompanied the fragrant fillets with all sorts of delicious delicacies from the large hampers they had brought along, in turn prepared by the expert chefs of the palace. She had always looked upon these dreamy afternoons with Piers with fondness; but now she faces a lone fish. There are no savory sauces prepared beforehand by the palace chef, no pungent herbs and spices, no yeasty breads, no cold soups made of fruit and thick cream, no golden, sweet wines, and, to her infinite regret, no fire. Just a poor dead cold fish. Her knowledge of cleaning fish is strictly academic: she had watched her cousin do it a dozen times, though without any particular effort to impress it upon her memory. Her attempt on this present specimen is honest, but brutal. There is a great deal of unpleasantness, but she is ultimately rewarded with two glistening fillets of translucent white meat. There is nothing for it now but to eat it. The crawfish had not been any particular problem, they are not un-like shrimp either cooked or raw. But now . . .

  She fights back her gorge and gingerly bites into one of the pieces. It is not nearly so bad as she had expected, but taste is not everything: imagination plays a great if unwelcome role at times like these. Nevertheless, she eats all the fish and most importantly, keeps it all. In all of her adventures to follow, few things give her more secret pride than the eating of that fish.

  By the end of the afternoon she has caught three more trout. Stringing them on a piece of twine, she carries them away from the stream, looking for a sheltered place to spend the night. This she finds nearby in the form of a great pile of broken boulders in the midst of which is a cave-like hollow perhaps twelve or fifteen feet deep. She has just dropped the fish onto a table-like slab of rock when a shadow rises over her. Startled, she gasps, whirls around and would have found herself face to face with an enormous brown bear if that terrifying face has not been several feet above her own. The animal, undoubtedly attracted by the trout, blocks the entrance to the hollow with its shaggy body. Alarmed by the noise she is making and her sudden movement, the animal has reared up on its short, bowed hind legs. It looks as big as Thud.

  Bronwyn backs further into the cave but is brought up short against the rear wall after retreating only a few paces. The bear ignores her. It drops back onto all fours and begins to snuffle noisily at the fish. Bronwyn, as slowly as she can, draws her big revolver from the blanket roll slung across her back. Raising the massive weapon with both hands, she draws back its hammer with her thumbs. It makes a click that itself sounds like a gun going off. The bear turns at the sound, a low growl rumbling deep and speculatively within its throat. Bronwyn tries to freeze, but her hands shake with the weight of the revolver and sweat pours into her eyes, stinging them with the salt. She can’t control her breath, which comes in short gasps, as though she has just run to exhaustion, a sound that seems to annoy the bear.

  The animal turns away from the fish and takes a few rolling steps toward the girl.

  “Go away!” she whispers, feeling like an idiot, but after pausing only briefly, the bear comes few feet closer.

  “No!” she begs as the animal suddenly rises onto its hind legs again, its dog-like head brushing the top of the shelter. Its black lips roll back in a snarl, revealing yellow, wet tusks whose sharp points glint like daggers. The gun seems to go off on its own accord. The recoil nearly throws the weapon from her grasp and sends a shooting pain through her wrenched wrists. She sees a spray of red from behind the bear as the enormous projectile makes its fearsome exit wound. The bear shrieks like a locomotive and instantly falls forward onto the princess, its hooked, black talons flailing in the blind frenzy of agony. Bronwyn can feel her flesh parting like torn cloth, and with much the same sound. There is little or no pain, only a sort of reverie in the subjective action of which she seems to be taking a smaller and smaller part. As shock shuts down her circulatory system, she finds no will to resist her fate; even though she knows, as a kind of abstraction, that the bear is playing with her as a dog would a rag doll. I will now be a rag princess. There is a sudden, sharp explosion and everything becomes red, then a black, dreamless oblivion.

  CHAPTER X

  DREAMS & SNOWDRIFTS

  Bronwyn awakes to strange voices. She can’t distinguish words at first, but the tones are friendly, muted and warm, which is something, anyway. She doesn’t open her eyes immediately. She is still too aware of her last remembered sensations: the suffocating weight of the bear, the moistness of its sweetly rancid breath on her face, the black claws glistening with her own blood. She fears that perhaps she is in some shock-induced dream, that the first sight upon opening her eyes would be the glinting button-eyes of the huge animal. And she is afraid she would see what it is eating.

  The smells are all wrong, though. A fragrant combination of wood smoke, pipe tobacco, bread, wool, pine tar, and, Musrum be blessed!, the heady odor of rich food. Her nostrils are successfully trying to convince her that some sort of meat is cooking nearby. As a mental exercise, she tries sorting out the smells: meat and onions predominate, but there is also the earthiness of potatoes, the sweetness of carrots, licoricey fennel, the punctuation of peppers and other spices. A stew? Can it be? Her sense of touch is equally transformed. She is no longer cold, but is instead enveloped in some kind of soft cocoon that is deliciously warm and prot
ecting.

  “Has she wakened?” says one of the voices, a woman’s, nearer now.

  “I think so,” comes the answer, a man’s voice, also very close to her.

  She chances opening one eye. Not far away hovers a pink globe of a face, not at all unlike a rising full moon. It beams when it sees her open an eye and immediately grows pinker and rounder if that are possible.

  “Yes, yes!” the voice continues, and now she sees that the man’s voice issues from the pink face. “I do believe she is awake at last!”

  Another face joins the first one, so much like it that Bronwyn wonders at first if her vision is playing her tricks, she squeezes her eyes shut and reopens them, to see if she can make the superfluous face go away. It is not only still there, it now speaks with the woman’s voice.

  “Oh, yes! She’s awake! The poor dear; see to her, Father, while I fetch something for her to eat.”

  “Certainly, Mother.”

  The man turns to Bronwyn and asks, “Are you awake?”

  Bronwyn nods her head in answer, she tries to speak, but the words stick in her throat.

  “How are you feeling, then?”

  All she can do is manage a kind of shrug.

  “Can you sit up? Let me help you.”

  The odor of wool and pipe smoke grows stronger and powerful hands gently ease her up until she is props into more or less of a slouch, her back supported by fat cushions. She looks around carefully, discovering that she feel incredibly lightheaded. As though she has not eaten in a week, rather than only a day or two, or so she thinks. She finds that she is in a room, low-ceilinged, heavily timbered with plaster in the interstices, and crowded with details. Even in her confused condition, she is struck by the room’s color and whimsy. Not a square inch is undecorated. The beams and timbers that frame and criss-cross the walls and ceiling are intricately chip-carved; the plastered areas have painted borders of flowery garlands, the centers filled with gaudy, framed chromos. The furniture, though simple in form, is as elaborately carved as the woodwork, and is painted in primary colors with decorations of vines and flowers in the most naïve style. Thinking of the labor that must be invested in such meticulous work, she concludes that the winters in this place must be excruciatingly long and boring.