Read A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
Bronwyn’s morbid imagination reasserts itself by reminding her of how much the cloudscape resembles a graveyard in the winter, the tombstones and vaults reduced to bosomy hummocks, the balloon drifting among the monuments like a snowflake lonely as her own individuality.
The balloon sails among the towering piles like an eagle lost among alpine peaks. The sky above the white plain is intensely blue, shading to an infinite indigo directly overhead (or as much of the zenith that the balloon isn’t eclipsing).
“Look!” cries Bronwyn.
The balloon is passing not far from a nearly vertical expanse of cloud, like a fly about to land on a wall, and the balloon’s shadow is being cast upon it by the lowering sun, a deep blue circle that looks like a tunnel bored through the sky. But what had caused the princess to cry out are the concentric rings of brilliant colors that surrounded the shadow. Colors of an intense purity, red, blue, yellow, green, red, blue, yellow, green, repeating themselves as they grow further from the shadow and fainter, eventually merging into the white of the cloud.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!” she whispers.
“Chromatic refraction,” mutters Gyven in an awed tone.
“It looks like a target,” says Thud, rather spoiling things.
“Look, there is a storm,” says the baron, pointing in the direction of the sun. Turning to look, Bronwyn sees a sight as breathtaking as the corona had been, but many times more frightening: an enormous thunderhead, towering tens of thousands of feet above them, its top sheared off by gale-force winds into an anvil that Musrum could have forged planets upon. It is many miles away, yet is still the single largest object that Bronwyn has ever seen. Deep within its base blue-violet light pulsed and throbbed.
“I’d hate to get caught in that,” says Milnikov.
“I’m hungry,” says Thud.
“And I’m freezing,” adds Bronwyn, whose choice of clothing had been based upon ruggedness rather than warmth. “Can’t we go back down?”
“Good idea,” agrees the baron. “We just need to release some gas, I suppose.”
“Pull on the rope coming out of the mouth of the balloon,” Bronwyn instructs.
“Are you sure about that?”
“As you say, I ask a lot of questions. Just give it a short pull; the balloon won’t react right away and we don’t want to start descending too quickly.”
“All right.” The baron gives a tug on the rope. He and Bronwyn both expect to hear the gas hissing as it escaped, but there is no sound.
“Did it work?” she asks.
“I don’t think we’re moving.”
“Yes, we are! But awfully slowly; pull the rope again.”
This time the balloon begins to sink more rapidly. It drops through the cloud deck and comes to a state of equilibrium just below. The entire aspect of the lower atmosphere has altered in just the short time they had been above the clouds. The air is moist and grey, with a distinct greenish cast. Dark curtains of rain veil the horizon, shifting in the wind like dirty draperies. Lightning spits and crackles in the distance and Bronwyn can feel the downy hairs on her neck and arms bristling, as they had done inTudela’s laboratory.
“This reminds me far too vividly of that night atop the prison,” says the baron, nervously.
“Me, too,” replies the princess.
“Can we avoid the storm?” asks Gyven.
“I don’t know,” answers Bronwyn. “I’d think that we’d travel with it. Let’s wait and see . . . we can’t keep wasting gas and ballast going up and down.”
“Is there anything to eat?”
“That’s a good idea, Thud; we’ll see. Baron, did you and Gyven bring any food?”
“No, there is neither time nor opportunity.”
“Thud and I got some things from the kitchen yesterday,” says Gyven, “on the pretext of going on a picnic, enough for at least one sparse meal among the four of us, anyway. Let’s see what came with the balloon. Look here.” He holsd up a jar of some preserved food and a cylindrical loaf of bread. “The bread’s a little stale, but not bad, I think, and we’ll see what’s in these jars.”
“Hm,” hums the baron, taking one of them. “It appears that at least one of the official aerialists is an Ibrailan.”
“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.
After the balloon has lain on the forest floor for an hour or two, an inquisitive squirrel approaches and cautiously sniffs at the folds. The smell is peculiar and the squirrel lopes back into the forest, its curiosity satisfied, the event already long past the statute of limitations for its attention span.
The storm above passes and there is a brief glow of amber light before night falls. The forest at night is as dark and silent as the interior of a block of black marble. All that night, nothing disturbs the collapsed balloon.
As the dusty light of dawn filters through the forest’s canopy, there is at last a stirring from beneath the envelope. Princess Bronwyn’s head is the first object to emerge. She draws her body out after it, wobbles a little on all fours, staggers a few steps and sits down with a thump on the resilient moss. She holds her head in her hands, turning it slowly side to side. All things considered, she could look much worse for having plummeted hundreds of feet from the sky. As she takes stock of her various bits and pieces, she comes to much the same conclusion. There are bruises and abrasions everywhere (she looks much like a patchwork quilt), but nothing important or necessary appears to be broken or even seriously out of order. Her rusty hair looks like a feather duster, what parts of her that aren’t bruised are covered with dirt, and she is dressed, if only technically speaking, in what little remains of her clothing; what had not gone overboard in the futile attempt to save the balloon had been torn away by the trees.
There are further rustling sounds from within the envelope.
“Baron? Gyven?” she calls, then: “Thud?”
Though she is still unsteady, she manages to get upright and began tugging at the edges of the fabric.
“Where are you? Thud? Baron? Someone answer me!”
There comes an answer, but it is too muffled to be decipherable. Actually, there are two muffled sounds, from opposite sides of the mound. Therefore at least two of her companions are still alive, or at least conscious, but which two?
A partial answer to that question comes with the appearance of a woolen-clad rear end, backing out from beneath the fabric. It is the less-than-elegant rebirth of the baron who, when he turns and sees the princess watching him with a smirk, gives her a courtly bow and says, “Her Highness the Princess surprises me in
dishabille!
” As indeed he is, his gangly frame covered solely, albeit from ankles to wrists, by a shapeless red woolen undergarment. His hair sprays from around the crown of his bald head, looking like a photograph of a bowling ball dropped into a pool of ink. His normally jaunty moustache, rather than looking as sharp as a pair of dividers, now looks more like a large squashed insect. Still, it would take a great deal more than this to divest the Baron Milnikov of his style.
There is a groan from within the envelope and both the baron and the princess turn in time to see Gyven emerge from an enormous rent in the heavy fabric.
“Gyven!” the princess cries.
The man merely sways like a reed, his head swinging from side to side like a snake’s or a precessing gyroscope.
“Are you all right?”
He takes his head in his hands and then holds it steady for a moment.
“Yes. It is just difficult to focus on anything immediately.”
He wades across the crests and deep folds to join the other two castaways.
“You don’t
look
all right.” And he doesn’t. He still bears the wounds and bandages of the previous day, to which are added an additional share of bruises and scrapes. His clothing has been reduced to pair of long underdrawers. Bronwyn thinks he looks like a vandalized statue.
“Where’s Thud?” she asks.
“Thud?” repeats the baron, exchanging a glance with Gyven.