A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess (11 page)

“My information is that
you
assaulted
them
. Is that incorrect?”

“Well, no, not exactly . . .”

“Well, what is it then? If you have something to say, please say it. If not, there are penalties for isting the time of this court.”

“One of my companions did get into a, ah, an altercation, but he was provoked.”

The magistrate turns his head in the direction of one of his bailiffs. “Was there provocation as this young lady says?”

“Huh?”

“Who started the fight?”

“They did, yer honor.”

“Ten crowns or ten days, and I’m not going to include anything additional for aggravating me.”

“But we don’t have ten crowns, your honor!”

“You don’t?” the wrinkled face puckers into itself even further. The magistrate’s sloping shoulders are covered with ivory drifts of molted skin. “How much do you have?”

“I don’t have any money. Professor . . . Grandfather . . . do you have any?”

“Me? No, not a poenig.” He turns his pockets inside out to prove this.

“No money at all, eh? How did you intend to pay for your meal?”

“What? I . . . ah . . .” stammers the princess. “My other friend . . . I assumed that he had some money.”

“You did, eh?” He leaned back into his chair. “Ten days
and
ten crowns. Next case.”

“But we don’t
have
ten crowns!” Bronwyn cries as the bailiffs lifted her from the floor. “I just told you that!”

“Then you’ll just have to stay in jail until you do get it.”

“But how can I get ten crowns while I’m locked up?”

“That’s not my problem, is it? Another question, young lady, is going to cost you another five days and another five crowns. And that’s no proper way for a young lady to dress. Five days for indecency.”

It took more self-control than Bronwyn had ever suspected she possessed to keep her mouth shut and allow herself to be carried silently from the chamber. Her tongue became gritty from the flecks of enamel chipping from her clenched teeth. She and the professor are carried up a flight of steps as though the bailiffs were porters and they were luggage belonging to a visiting tourist. The second floor of the building is divided into half a dozen cells, each a small cubicle with two iron beds. Three walls of each cell are brick and the fourth is barricaded by heavy iron bars. Every other cell has a small barred window, about two feet square, high up on the outside wall. There are, at the moment, apparently no other prisoners. Nevertheless Bronwyn and the professor are locked into the same cubicle, probably because the court believed their fictional relationship. As the bailiff turns to leave them, the princess asks, “Say, do we get meals here?”

“Sure you do. Get ‘em from Smelly Nell’s”

“Wonderful. Is it about time for one?”

“Huh? I dunno. I guess so.”

“We sure can use something to eat.”

“I’ll have to ask the magistrate.”

“Well,” says the princess, after their jailer has gone on his mission, and throwing herself onto the twanging cot, “what a miserable little town this is.”

“At least they don’t know who you are.”

“How long will that last, do you think? Word is bound to filter down here sooner or later. I don’t think that Payne would believe that I’m dead unless he personally sees my body . . . not any longer, at any rate. If he’s not satisfied with just knowing that my ship is lost, he will intensify his search. And even this godforsaken place won’t go overlooked for long.”

“So the longer we stay here, the more likely it is that someone will discover who you are.”

“That’s exactly it. Besides, what’s happened to the rest of my army? What happened to the other ships during the storm? Both your ship and mine are lost. Are all the others wrecked, as well?”

“I’d like to know that, too. If the
Barracuda,
with all of my equipment and devices is lost, I don’t know how I can help you.”

“We’re at the far end of nowhere here. There’ll be no news.” She sits on the hard edge of her cot, slumped dejectedly. “We can’t just sit here for ten days. No matter how far out of the way this degenerate toilet of a town is, word about us is bound to arrive, officially or unofficially. In any case, we can’t stay here; we can’t have come this far for nothing.”

“How far are we from Blavek, do you think?”

“Holy Musrum, we must be seven or eight hundred miles from the capital. Maybe four hundred miles or so from the most likely place for the fleet to have landed, somewhere between the Strait and Stuckney Bay . . . if they weren’t all lost on the Grand Bank. If that happened, I don’t know what we can do. And if they are there, we’d have to travel through almost trackless country to join them.”

“Let me think about it.”

He thinks for three days. During that time, Bronwyn became ever more impatient and irritable, making her even more irascible and sarcastic than normal. They are fed at irregular but not overlong intervals, and far better than she might have expected, based upon her one experience with the cuisine of the poverty-stricken village. Evidently, with the loss of Smelly Nell’s, the chore of feeding the town’s prisoners has fallen upon a more capable, if not more hygienic, individual. Bread, a thin soup and water is the invariable menu. Bronwyn and the professor each have a deep wooden bowl they are allowed to keep, as well as a tin cup. To Bronwyn’s surprise they are also provided a short, thick tallow candle, as big as her fist, that smells like burning fish oil (naturally) but at least provides a warm, if dim, glow at night. They are not allowed to have matches or any other way to start a fire; every evening the jailer lights the candle for them and it is thereafter the responsibility of the prisoners to husband the candle if they wish to have light on subsequent nights. They see no one except their jailer, a small, scrawny man who looks as though he is covered with some sort of crust.

The princess and the professor had not been given any clothes to replace the ones they had been wearing when arrested. Bronwyn is still wearing the same calf-length trousers and long-sleeved blouse, both of a grey, homespun cloth, she had been given by Captain Prittly and is of course still barefoot. She tries to reserve a little of her drinking water for washing, but is rapidly and distressingly losing ground. She can smell herself and she hates being able to do that. Almost as much as she thinks she hates Basseliniden. She tries very hard to hate him as much as she does Payne or Ferenc, but without the degree of success she really hopes for. It is not, she considers, that she feels particularly generous, it is just that she feels very tired. She is, in fact, finding it increasingly difficult to summon the emotional energy she possessed even a year ago.

On the evening of the fourth day, near midnight, or at least several hours after the princess and the professor have frugally extinguished their candle, Brownyn hears a hard
thunk,
as though something hard had fallen onto the floor of the cell. She climbs from her cot and sees, centered in the trapezoid of faint blue moonlight on the floor, a rock. Someone, she realizes, must have thrown or dropped it through the window. Picking it up she discovers is a folded piece of paper attached to it with a string. Removing this and unfolding it she can just see that the paper is covered with writing, but the light is too faint to read it and she, of course, has no way to relight the candle. In order not to awaken the professor, who is buzzing lightly in the depth of his slumber, she decides that she would have to wait until morning to see what the message is.

At dawn’s first light, Bronwyn takes the paper from beneath her pillow and looks at it. A deep vertical furrow appears in her brow directly above her long nose. This is what she sees:

TTJUK HLA+UI LWLLo TR..YY wluyD WEJAL .YOUS

ALJDL ,LA.L R++RKIR ELAJC ALF3E LWMFL AJc!A

ALJEM ALJEM ooME? //AME WLEMP .TYE. QlcNE

ALKMn NNLEP bKENS ss47? KME;L A; . . . EEMEE

“What’s that?” asks the professor, rising from his bed.

“I’m not sure. Someone tossed it through the window last night tied to a rock.”

“May I see it?”

She hands him the wrinked paper and the scientist, after screwing his pince-nez onto his nose, scrutinizes it closely, turning it over and around, and even examining the apparently blank backside.

“Hm,” he says.

“What do you think it is?”

“It’s some sort of code or cypher.”

“I think I figured that much out. Can you tell what it says?”

“No, but perhaps after I work on it . . .” And he did, for almost two days without pause, scratching endless and, to the princess, meaningless, scribbles on the stone walls. She quickly begins to grow sorry that she had shown the thing to him, since it meant losing the only company she had. At noon on their seventh day of incarceration she begins to badger the professor for some sort of progress report, even if a negative one.

“I’m afraid that is just what I’ve have to conclude,” he tells her.

“What’s that?”

“That I can make nothing of this. All I can imagine is that it is intended for some other prisoner.”

“We’re just jumping to the conclusion that it is a message for us?”

“Probably.”

“Whoever it’s from must have either thought that someone else is here, or he threw the stone through the wrong window. Probably whoever it is really for would know how to decode the message.”

“Undoubtedly. There must be some key without which the message is indecipherable.”

“This is all just a waste of time, then.”

“Oh, not at all! It’s been extremely enjoyable.”

“How can you say that? You’ve spent a day and a half and you’re just as mystified as when you started.”

“So?”

On the evening of that seventh day, after the jailer had lit their candle and left, Professor Wittenoom says, “I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

Instead of answering her directly, he says, “See if you can unscrew one of the legs from your cot.”

Puzzled, the princess complies. The bed is made of iron pipes joined by straight, angled and T-shaped couplings. The legs are capped by feet that screw on. She carefully turns the bed over so that its legs protrude vertically and, sitting on the floor with her legs on either side of one of the iron pipes, grasps and tries to turn it. It seemed welded together. The metal is flaky with rust and her palms turn red with it. She wraps the long tail of her blouse around her hands and tries again, bracing her feet against the iron framework. She thinks she can feel the pipe give a fraction of an inch. Bracing herself once more, she tries twisting the pipe again. Her face reddens and her arms cord with muscles she hadn’t even been aware she had. She gives a grunt of surprise and satisfaction when the pipe gives another fraction of an inch. Her next efforts are progressively easier until finally she is able to unscrew the leg completely.

“What do I do with it now?”

“Give it to me, please.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have an idea,” he repeats, and she can get no other answer from the scientist. She watches, curiously, as he tears pages from his precious notebook, shreds them, and places them to soak in the waterbowl. Soon he has a sodden mass of papier-mâché as big as both his fists together. This he packs into the pipe. While he does so, he asks the princess if she would remove one of the endcaps from one of the other bed legs. This is more difficult than unscrewing a leg, but after a great deal of perspiration and guttural muttering she manages. By the time she hands Wittenoom the cup-shaped piece of threaded iron he has the foot-long pipe filled with soggy paper. Taking the cap from her, he screws it tightly onto the open end.

He then empties what water remains in the bowl onto the floor and dries the bowl on his shirttail. The remaining pages of his notebook are then torn and placed in the container, crumpled into a dense wad. All the while he puffs at his pipe as though possessed with the idea that it might extinguish itself.

Bronwyn has given up guessing and sits on the floor, crosslegged, watching him with a kind of resigned fascination.

The next bizarre operation the professor performs is to tear long strips from his shirt, until he has perhaps fifteen or twenty ribbons an inch or so wide and three feet or so in length. There is now a sizable gap between the professor’s shirt and the top of his trousers. Bronwyn is shocked to see how far his ribs protrude.

Setting the ribbons aside, he ignites the shredded paper with the candle, blows out the wick and places the candle in the tin cup. He holds the cup above the flaming bowl until the tallow has completely melted. Taking the ribbons of fabric, he places them into the melted fat, occasionally reheating the container to keep the tallow liquid, until the cup is filled with a mixture of cloth and congealing fat.

While the mass is still warm and pliable, Wittenoom uses it to coat the outside of the iron pipe until it resembled a fat, translucent grub.

“Set the beds up on edge,” he says to the princess, speaking for the first time in nearly an hour, “as closely to the bars as you can.”

Bronwyn does so, realizing that the beds now look disturbingly like barricades. Meanwhile the professor places the tallow and cloth-wrapped pipe on the windowsill, jammed tightly between two of the iron bars.

Using the last glowing ember from the bowl, he ignites a protruding tatter of cloth. It immediately flares like a torch. The professor carefully watches his creation, which after a few moments is now flaming with a distinct roar with melting tallow drooling oily down the cell wall. Satisfied, he casually joins the princess, who, correctly discerning their purpose, has already taken her place behind the upturned mattresses.

“Get as far down as you can and hold your ears,” he suggests.

“What . . .” is as far as whatever question it is she is going to ask gets when there is a tremendous explosion, a wicked crack like a bullwhip artist flicking a mosquito from the air an inch from her ear. She feels the bed pummeled as though by grapeshot and the bars behind her ring like the chimes of a glockenspiel as a thousand fragments of iron and brick strike them.