A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (23 page)

“What are you getting at, your Highness?” Rykkla said with considerable foreboding. “What do Thud and I have to do with all of this?”

“Nothing all that difficult, we assure you. Nothing that we’d hesitate doing ourselves, were we not prohibited from the surface of the earth. The merest bagatelle for a surface-dweller. We ask nothing more of you than the trifling favor of begging the faeries to abandon their plans to drop the moon.”

“That’s all? Why should they listen to me?”

“Why not? Besides, we’ll be glad to do a favor for you in return.”

“Oh? like what?”

“Return you and Thud to the upper world?” he said as he passed a slate salver toward her. “Have a lichen?”

Rykkla and Thud were provided quarters that were, at least by Kobold standards, luxurious, though she thought them not just monastic but penitent. The beds were vast slabs of marble, like those that might be found in a candy shop or mortuary, the floors and walls were undecorated marble, the furniture the kind of approximations that a child might attempt with his or her building blocks. The only artfulness was purely serendipitous: an accidentally attractive pattern in the coloring and texture in the parquet floor that was intrinsic to the materials used; the use of elaborately twisted, sinuously polished flowstone for some of the furnishings; enormous, spectacularly faceted crystals hollowed out as containers.

Water flowed from a spout in one wall, falling into a basin scooped out of the floor, which also seemed to be the sole sanitary facility. Thud’s adjoining chamber was an indistinguishable duplicate.

As tired as Rykkla was, she was not so tired as to be not pleased. “How can I sleep on this?” she grumbled, slapping the chilly surface of the bed with her hand. “Do they think that I’m a slab of meat in a butcher shop?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Thud.

“And why not?”

“I don’t think they know what a butcher shop is. Kobolds only eat moss, lichens and fungus.”

“Well, there’s no question that I’m taking the king up on his offer.”

“You’re going to see the faeries?”

“Hardly. That’s a fool’s errand if I ever heard of one. As soon as you and I are out of here, the king’s never going to hear of us again. What’s Slagelse going to do once we’re back on the surface? Sue me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m not staying here a moment longer than necessary. I’m very tired of being shut up in places that I don’t like by people I don’t like who want to do things to me that I like even less or who expect me to do things that I don’t want to do.” She looked at Thud’s sad face, that, for all of its simplicity and inexpressiveness, looked tired and worried. An unfortunate side effect of his increasing humanity. She sighed and allowed her clenched muscles to relax a degree. “I don’t like lying, but what am I to do? These faeries aren’t going to listen to me; why should they? And if they are at war, why shouldn’t they treat us like spies or something? Who knows what they could do? I certainly don’t. I haven’t even believed in faeries for most of my life. And look at it this way: Slagelse isn’t exactly acting in the most honorable way by making our release subject to such conditions. Why doesn’t he just let us go, instead of holding us hostage to our own parole like this?”

“I don’t know.”

At that moment a female Kobold rapped at the doorframe, carrying a large tray covered with steaming bowls and plates. Bid to enter, she placed the food onto a low table and retreated, not once removing her beady eyes from the human girl. Rykkla, not at all unused to being stared at, returned the scrutiny photon for photon. It was her first close look at the female of the species and it had for her much the same morbid fascination that some people have for sanguinary vehicular accidents. The Kobold looked like nothing so much as Thud with a pair of half-filled grain sacks attached to his chest. If, in fact, Rykkla was at least partly responsible, as the king implied, for Thud’s humanization, then she was immeasurably proud of that. Then the bizarre mental image intruded of Thud and a Kobold woman atop one of the marble slabs, bumping together like a pair of barrage balloons and she was unable to repress her second uncharacteristic giggle of the day.

“Feeling better?” Thud asked.

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so,” she said, mentally apologizing. “Is that food?”

“Uh huh. Good, too.” he replied, already inserting things into his capacious mouth. Even after witnessing it so many times it was invariably startling to watch the giant eat; his mouth was so wide that the whole top half of his round head seemed to hinge backwards, like the lid of a coffeepot, as he dropped food into the resultant circular opening.

“What do we have here?” she asked, poking around on the tray. Nothing looked very familiar and it all smelled a little like hot topsoil.

“Moss,” Thud replied, “mold, lichens, mushrooms. That’s a really good mildew soup; you should eat it while it’s hot.”

Un-like Princess Bronwyn, who when faced with Koboldan cuisine had prefered near-starvation, Rykkla was far more cosmopolitan. In her career, she had learned that it was prudent to eat what was available when it was available. Whatever her private opinions might have been, she silently helped herself to portions of each dish, though it might have been noticed by someone more observant than Thud that none were particularly lavish servings.

After her meal, Rykkla stripped off her clothing and, gritting her teeth, crouched beneath the stream of icy water that arched like a crystal buttress from the middle of a wall; it felt like broken glass pouring over her. Most of the grime sluiced away, and she used her kerchief to wipe herself as clean as she could. She was just straightening up when Thud reentered, asking: “What are you doing?”

“Taking a bath, what does it look like?”

“Why are you taking a bath there?”

“Because this is where the water is.”

“But these are the special rooms that King Slagelse got for us.”

“I can see that. It must be awful to have to stay in one of the ordinary rooms. What does that entail? getting a shovel and digging your own hole?”

“I don’t think so.” He pondered for a long moment, realizing that his thought had gotten off its track and it required a little effort to discover where it had wandered to. “Why didn’t you take a bath in the bathroom?”

“Is there one?”

“Sure.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why?’?”

“Well, you’ve already taken your bath.”

“Hardly. I just spread the dirt around more evenly. Show me where this bathroom is, will you?”

“Sure, if you want.”

He turned and walked out of the room. Wrapping her blouse towel-like around her hips, Rykkla hurried to follow, her bare feet slapping on the hard, smooth floor. There was a corridor that twisted, rose and fell nonsensically, which then opened into a medium-sized chamber that was dark, and not dark merely by reason of being lightless, but because any lingering glimmers were crowded out by a dense cloud of mineral-laden steam. The room was only medium-sized by Kobold standards; to Rykkla it looked as cavernous and gloomy as an empty theater. The only light was a faint beam of the same blue phosphorescence that illuminated the outside; this filtered through a narrow crack that split the ceiling diagonally from corner to corner. The thin curtain of light made her vision wavery and uncertain, as though she had just developed nictating membranes.

The steam billowed from half a dozen craters in the floor of the chamber. Among these sizzling fumaroles were two or three circular pools of water that bubbled like champagne, with wraiths of vapor curling and writhing across their surfaces like phantom ice skaters. Rykkla needed no more encouragement. She tossed her shirt aside and tentatively poked a toe into the water of the nearest pool, a crystalline disk four or five yards in diameter, absolutely transparent at its edge and rapidly segueing through every imaginable shade of blue from the palest cerulean to the deepest cobalt into an indigo in the center as pure and bottomless as a moonless night sky. The water was hot enough to sting, but not so hot as to scald and she stepped into the pool. It was only an inch or so deep at the rim, shelving funicularily toward its abyssal center. She gently walked into the deeper water, savoring the heat as it rose up her legs, until the sloping bottom became too steep to stand upon; then she allowed herself to drift into the seething liquid.

The water was only slightly hotter than body temperature and so laden with minerals and salts that it buoyed her body as weightlessly as a bubble; she was suspended in it as though she were in solution, neither rising nor sinking.

She turned her head, lazily, to where Thud stood, a massive silhouette against the billowing light, watching her motionlessly until he suddenly moved, with his characteristically bovine grace, to the edge of her pool. There, with only two or three efficient movements, he removed his own clothing, like a self-peeling grapefruit. For a moment he stood there, towering above her like a monument to some forgotten Titan, making her feel as though she were but some trifling offering placed at the feet of that heroic god of earth and mountains, some master sculptor’s Spirit of Geology, as though she were crawling at the plinth of one of the very columns that upheld the vault of heaven. Thud was no longer a Kobold, nor was he altogether a human, or if he was, he was a human according to the undespairing standards of those ancients whose idealized sculptures filled modern museums. What, she wondered, dreamily, could the human race have become had not the race of Kobolds chosen to live underground, where over the millenia they softened and bloated like enormous corpses? Once upon a time Thud had resembled more than anything one of those balloon figures that the late Slappo the Clown had made for the youthful patrons of her circus: a soft, featureless, undistinguished collection of spheres and ellipsoids. He was still superhumanly large, as massive as an ox, but now instead of the smooth superficialities of a balloon, Thud was as detailed as a planet. Even his round head was no longer as blankly innocuous as a loaf of bread but, while still remaining distinctively Thudean, had gained a strange refinement. He was not
ugly,
he was
homely
, and there is a world of difference between those two adjectives. His body was muscled in enormous slabs, like the overlapping plates of the rhinoceros, as though he were some artist’s attempt at symbolizing the raw forces of the earthquake, avalanche or volcano, a monument to steam power, turbines and drop forge presses. When he moved it was like watching the dynamic and ponderous gavotte of drifting continents, where epochs took place in seconds, and mountains, valleys and plains were created and destroyed before her eyes. His arms and legs looked like veins of precious ores, with mercury and molten lava running through those veins, while at the core of it all throbbed a heart of surging magma.

He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and that revelation struck her as though an electric current had been applied directly to her brain; her whole body stiffened with the jolt and her fingers and toes stuck out like the quills of the fretful porcupine.

Without violating his habitual silence, Thud stepped into the water, creating waves that rocked and splashed around the mesmerized girl, as though he were some rogue planet entering her private solar system, his irresistable gravity tearing and warping the peaceful orbit of her world. The dim light glinted from the ripples like meteors.

Rykkla, who had allowed no man to approach her for years, flowed toward Thud tropistically, like water seeking the center of the earth.

“It had occured to us, of course,” said King Slagelse at the next audience he permitted Rykkla and Thud, “that you might be inclined to make whatever promises you felt necessary to encourage me to allow you to leave, then go about your way once back on the surface.”

“Your Highness!” protested Rykkla. “Such a thing never crossed my mind!”

“We’re sure it didn’t, but you can appreciate our need for caution, can you not? You are an opportunity that may not occur again, certainly not before the faeries have created their catastrophe. It puts us in a quandary, however. You will need assistance, yet it would behoove us to ask someone to remain behind as, ”

“Hostage!”

“, insurance against the default of our agreement. However, Musrum has been kind to us and has provided us with a solution. Thud,” he said, turning to the big man, “you will remain here with us until Rykkla returns after having successfully completed her mission.”

“If Thud stays here,” protested the girl, “who will go with me to the upper world?”

“Gyven, here.” At which words a tall man stepped from behind the dais. Rykkla stared at him speechlessly for a very long moment.

“
Gyven!
” she finally cried, half in disbelief.

“Hello, Rykkla. It’s certainly good to see you.”

“What in the world are you doing here? Where’s Bronwyn? Is she here, too?”

“No. In fact, I have no idea where she is. I was called away by King Slagelse, to consult with him concerning what was then the very mysterious occurence of the meteor impacts. Such random, inexplicable events are very upsetting to a civilization as ordered and as concerned with the earth as is the Kobolds’. Of course, once I discovered that the faeries were behind the whole thing, I knew that there was nothing that I could do. I returned to Toth, finally able to explain to Bronwyn why I had to have been so mysteriously absent so often and for so long, only to find that she was no longer of this earth.”

“What?” Rykkla felt her blood drain from her as though someone had just opened taps in her feet. Could the princess be dead? “Bronwyn . . . Bronwyn is gone?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking. She had volunteered for a place in a rocket that was to be sent to the moon. I knew about this before leaving, of course, and saw nothing particularly wrong with it. However, once I found that the reason for the meteors was the imminent disintegration of the moon, I knew that it would be tragically dangerous to go there. I hastened to warn her, but it was too late; she had already left.”