A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (7 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

THE HOURI

The next time I get the urge to go to Spondula, grumbled Rykkla,
I’ll talk myself out of it.

She had been on a road, a very dusty, rutted, potholed road, as corrugated as a washboard, as pitted as her captors’ faces, for only two days, though she would have argued persuasively that it had been much longer. She would have been wrong, of course, but in fairness an allowance must be made for subjective experience. She was surrounded by a company of ugly, fearsomely-competent-looking soldiers under the command of a supremely ugly man who looked dangerous enough to explode from a sheer superabundance of malignity. For all she knew, and suspected, advancement in the Ibrailan army was based solely upon the distance one could insinuate existed between oneself and humanity. Oddly, the officer seemed to be in his turn under the orders of a man neither particularly ugly nor particularly dangerous-looking. This person looked more like a elderly weasel, one ill-preserved by an amateur taxidermist, shriveled and wizened, with little bits of stuffing leaking through seams here and there, who had fluttered around what was to have been Rykkla’s funeral pyre, waving his skinny hands and piping orders in a reedy, high-pitched voice, like an outraged grandmother or a Punch-and-Judy man. The surly and disappointed villagers cowed beneath his wrath, even unto the burly thugs who had manhandled Rykkla. Meanwhile, the armed men who accompanied him untied the three-quarter-suffocated girl and helped her as she staggered down the still-smoldering pile of wood.

The weasel had turned to her, wringing his hands obsequiously after she had taken the long robe he offered, and said, surprisingly, “Miss Woxen, I presume?” When she assented, he introduced himself as Dubar ak-Poom, chamberlain of the court of the Baudad Alcatode, whose sincerely heartfelt apologies he offered, along with, by way of modest and insufficient restitution, the eradication of the village and all of its inhabitants.

“That won’t be necessary,” she replied, her voice momentarily muffled by the folds of the singed and still-smoking robe as she pulled it over her head. Her dark, hawkish face, scowling above the striped desert garment, made her look far more like an Ibrailan native than she would ever have cared to know. She was as disturbed by the eagerness of the man’s suggestion as by the appearance of sincere disappointment on his shriveled face. Had it not looked like it would have pleased him so much, she might have assented.

“We should at least punish those particular individuals responsible for your ill-treatment, Miss Woxen, don’t you think?”

“I’d just like to get out of here, if you don’t mind.”

“We should execute
one
,” he whined. “At least one, for discipline’s sake.”

“Look here, ak-Poom,” she said, suddenly serious, “there’s a friend of mine that the villagers left up there in a crater. He was hurt. For all I know he may be dying; I’m sure he must be. Can’t we go look for him?”

“They tried to kill your friend?”

“They stoned him and pushed him into the crater.”

“If they killed him, shouldn’t some of them be destroyed, then? It’d be well within the letter of the law, really, you know. And the spirit of the law certainly demands it.”

“Look, I really don’t care what you do with these miserable people . . . they’re your problem, not mine; I’m not a citizen, thank Musrum, of this benighted country. All I want to do is find my friend and get out of here.”

“Where did you say this odious crime took place?”

“Up there,” she replied, pointing to the rim of the distant excavation.

“I’ll send some of my men with you,” ak-Poon agreed, grudgingly, “they’ll help search for your friend.”

Six of the chamberlain’s soldiers accompanied Rykkla back up the rubbly slope, where they discovered no sign of the big man. The interior of the bowl-shaped depression was lined with pulverized stone and rocks, none larger than Rykkla’s fist. There certainly was nothing as large as Thud, who would have stood out like a hogshead in a room full of thimbles. Nevertheless, she searched until Chamberlain ak-Poom began to pipe shrilly from the base of the crater rim and, in turn, his men began to insist that she abandon her search. She went with them, relunctantly, having already admitted to herself that her hopes were groundless.

As she now jounced along the road to Spondula, Rykkla wondered:
If Thud’s body wasn’t in the crater, then where is it? He’s obviously either dead or alive; if dead, there should have been a body; if alive, then where could he have gone? And if he is gone, why hasn’t he come to me?
To that latter question she had no reply, but the further she rode from the crater, the further she knew she was retreating from any possible answer.

The spires and domes of Spondula solidified from the horizon’s wavering mirages like crystals forming from a supersaturated solution just after noon on the third day. As she grew closer, Rykkla relunctantly admitted to herself that it was not an unattractive sight, though even more attractive would be her first sight of Spondula harbor, which would be filled to the brim with ships bound for anywhere at all. As the caravan crested the last low hill before the city gates, she caught a tantalizing glimpse of the crowded quays and sparkling pale blue sea beyond. The city was built in the midst of the Spondula River delta, which spread its dazzling lacery beneath the hovering sun, and, just for a disturbing moment, the capital looked like a patient spider squatting in its dew-jeweled web.

The capital, close up, was as dry, dusty and vaguely threadbare as the rest of Ibraila, but for all of that it was no less glamorous or seductive. A sense of immense history oozed from every crack and crevice, like oil from an overburdened barrel. Rykkla could not help but feel her torpid spirits being stirred, like the bitter leaves at the bottom of a cup of tea. Spondula, for all that it was the capital of a country she had with good reason grown to find repellent, still had the power to recall the thousand faerie tales that were set among its mosaic towers, labyrinthine palaces, and domes decorated and gilded like a basketful of St. Wladimir’s Festival eggs. There was the imposing bulk of the Great Cathedral of Bujoldipoor, with its graceful spires and pretty Ibrailan fountain (though now dry and deprived of its elegant roof); the National Perdusium that preserved records from the dawn of history itself, that no human had looked at in centuries; the sprawling University with its hundreds of sequestered scholars each spending his entire life ruminating on a single thought (though some of the more progressive savants had taken to recording their philosophies, the older conservatives strove for that hallowed ideal where they would die upon arriving at their one Great Thought, before being tempted to utter so much as a single word of it). The city’s narrow, dirty, dog-infested and interminably convoluted streets were packed with throngs of noisy and noisome people who seemed to be doing nothing more useful or purposeful than milling and shouting. Natives of every outlying province as well as foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; dandies and frontiersmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; fortune-hunters, gold-hunters, game-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, men-hunters and women-hunters; truth-hunters and hunters after these hunters. Splendid ladies in silk, beautiful girls in rags and barefoot harridans; keen-eyed traders from the North and philosophers from the East; Ibrailan, Tamlaghtan, Peigambarese, Londeacans, Fezzarans, Mostazans, Udskayans and races and costumes and languages that Rykkla did not recognize. There were Udskayan traders with their heads stuck through holes in ragged blankets; there were aristocratic idiots trying to attract the female of their species; there were powerful-looking Mostazan boatmen and tobacco-colored planters from the Ibrailan border mountains. There were drab, ascetic Musrumic priests and jeweled, fat Musrumic bishops; soldiers in full regimentals and mercenaries in an amalgam of uniforms; there were slaves of every color and sex; jesters, mourners, teetotalers and drunkards, reformers and blackguards; fashionable Smerdenites and old-fashioned Doondners, Spôn-Rapidans and bulging Bool Bluffners, green-painted Splun-folk and startling Hideho People; and ten thousand filthy, naked children that scuttled underfoot like sandfleas. There were vendors of all kinds selling products of all kinds from shops, stalls, pushcarts, baskets, trays, urns, jars and barrels; from the middle of the road, from beneath patterned, patched awnings, from blankets and cloths spread at the foot of some crumbling, stuccoed wall or another. There were all manner of sweetmeats, piles of gourds, Smïybla melons, Puhnakha raisins, contrasting with the perfume vendors, bead, hardware, pottery and rug sellers. It was only a short time before Rykkla was caught up in the color and busyness of it all and forgot completely, or at least overlooked, the underlying seediness and hopelessness and Spondula gradually regained its old Romance, like a decrepit, alcoholic actor donning one of his ancient, ill-fitting, threadbare costumes in a pathetic effort to one last time hear an ovation that would never come.

Rykkla and her convoy proceeded directly to the Baudad’s palace, a gleamingly white overornamented affair that looked not un-like a chintzy wedding cake. Guards like spear bearers in an operetta passed them through a great iron gate with a kind of fearful, resentful deference toward the chamberlain. The heavy gate doors swung closed behind the convoy with a
bong
whose funerality was not lost upon Rykkla.

They dismounted at the perimeter of the flagstoned courtyard within and near a twinkling fountain that made Rykkla involuntarily lick her cracked lips. While the men led the perspiring and relieved animals away, Rykkla followed the chamberlain into the palace proper. At first she could see nothing in the dark, cavern--like hall, her eyes still accustomed to the brilliant sunlight. As her pupils dilated, she gradually became aware of a vast, cool room, its high, arched ceiling supported by scores of slender, braided columns. Shafts of dusty light slanted diagonally across the murky space from windows high above the sun-dappled floor. Lush draperies hanging in heavy catenaries decorated the walls.

“If you will be kind enough to wait here for just a few moments, I will make the necessary arrangements for your introduction to the Baudad. You should be comfortable; there are refreshments, please help yourself, and should you want for anything, simply tell this man,” he said, gesturing toward a towering menhir of muscle and cartilage that stood with its arms crossed, as silently and stolidly as a caryatid supporting a mausoleum. Ak-Poom left before she could say a word, his bootheels clattering on the parqueted marble floor. Rykkla glanced at what she assumed was more guard than servant and received little more in return than an unintelligent basilisk--like glare. There were overstuffed sofas and cushions everywhere, so she chose the nearest and began grazing among the trays of delicacies that were waiting on a dozen little ornately-carved tables. There were decanters of wine, fruit juices and spring water, effervescent and still, all freshly chilled and covered with sparkling dew, and these she drained one after the other. She devoured the food without stopping to see what it was, let alone taking time to taste it.

After what seemed to be only a few minutes, but what was in reality closer to forty-five, the chamberlain returned and summoned her to follow him.

Wherever she was being led required a meandering odyssey through labyrinthine passages, cavernous halls and colonnades like groves of marble trees and swooping staircases like terraced hillsides before finally arriving at an ornately-decorated door flanked by a pair of the largest men Rykkla had seen, with the exception, of course, of Thud Mollockle. Together, she estimated, they equaled no less than 1.75 Thuds. They blocked the door with steel-shanked battleaxes. They glared with eyes no less glitteringly steely at the chamberlain and his guest.

Ak-Poom ignored them and, turning to Rykkla, said, “The Baudad will receive you in the morning. He is not feeling himself at the moment and wishes to give you all of the attention that you, as a very special guest, deserve. He asks for your indulgence and in the meantime, offers you the hospitality of the palace. If you will pardon me for mentioning it, perhaps you may not object to an opportunity to remove the dust of the journey, and to rest, eat and drink? There will also be a change of clothing available, if you desire.”

“That all sounds exceedingly fine,” she replied. “I don’t think that I am particularly presentable at the moment. I believe that if anyone were to throw me at that wall, I’d stick to it.”

“Then perhaps the Baudad can expect you to join him for breakfast?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I shall come and fetch you at ten. In the meantime . . . ”

He gestured toward the guards who, until then not having shown a sign that they had even perceived his presence, uncrossed their axes as mechanically as a pair of machines. The chamberlain opened the door, using a complex-looking key that hung from a chain at his waist, and bid Rykkla to enter. She stepped ahead of him, then stopped so suddenly that ak-Poom bumped into her, causing them both to stumble forward inelegantly.

She had been wholly unprepared for what lay beyond the door:

A huge, sprawling room, certainly not as large as many of the others she had seen earlier by several orders of magnitude, but it was so filled with light that she had thought for a moment she had stepped out of doors, back into the desert. The room’s vaulted ceiling, its walls and floor were covered with a mosaic of porcelain tiles, either a translucent, soapy white or the palest of pastel tints, like nacreous squares of mother-of-pearl. The patterns were subtle and seemingly random, appearing to shift and flow like the diffracted spectra of an oil film, as though every surface were encrusted with enormous opals, which, indeed, they may have been. Silken banners, pennants and drapes of the same indistinctly transparent hues undulated from the walls or fluttered between the slender columns, drifting weightlessly like lazy tendrils of smoke or steam. Everywhere, little fountains tinkled clinquantly, while parakeets, cockatoos and canaries deliriously looped the loop among them.