A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (24 page)

“In a rocket?” Rykkla asked in some disbelief. “To the moon? What happened to her? Is she back? Is she all right?”

“I have no idea. Apparently the rocket reached the moon and was even able to leave it, and headed back to the earth. Beyond that, I don’t know what happened to her.”

“Poor Bronwyn! But she must be all right! Perhaps she landed someplace other than where she was supposed to? Who was with her?”

“Two others, both scientists from the Academy: Professor Wittenoom, who you know, and someone named Doctor Hughenden.”

“Wittenoom’s a genius, he wouldn’t allow anything to happen to the princess.”

“I can only hope not, but even genius cannot stand in the way of fate.”

“Pardon us,” interrupted the king, “but there is some urgency here. Rykkla, you and Gyven will confer with Hod Tawley, who is king of the faeries, with the purpose of convincing him that the continuation of his scheme would be folly of the highest order. Thud, you will remain here until our ambassadors return from their mission.”

“Sure,” replied Thud.

“Thud!” cried Rykkla.

“You will transport us to Hod Tawley’s kingdom?” asked Gyven, practically.

“It will take but a matter of minutes,” replied the king.

“Then we may as well get it over with,” Gyven said to Rykkla, reasonably, “and get back here as soon as we can.”

“But . . . “ There was no arguing; she could see that. She could even see the necessity of doing what Gyven suggested. She just did not like it.

Not wishing to waste another moment, the king directed a cadre of Kobolds to escort Rykkla and Gyven. The girl turned for a last look at Thud, who remained standing placidly, stolidly beside the throne, before she left the audience chamber. She waved, but he did not respond.

She and Gyven silently followed the Kobolds; she was grateful for the silence, as she was in no mood for conversation, even had her guides been capable of it. She scarcely noticed the twisting streets, the blandly curious crowds, neither the entrance to the side tunnel nor the circuitous, corkscrewing route that led inexorably upwards. She was scarcely aware of anything other than her own black mood until she noticed that there was a persistant breeze blowing across her face and ruffling her hair, and that it had the fragrance of green. Soon, there was the soft sound of rushing, splashing water and she saw not far ahead an indistinct circle of light: the mouth of the cave. Their Kobold guides would and could go no further, but only indicated that they would remain where they were until they had seen their charges pass beyond the opening. Rykkla saw no reason to argue, but hurried toward the cave mouth like a moth taking a bead on a lantern. The cave opened, she discovered, behind a waterfall that fell in a shimmering, metallic curtain not ten feet from where she stood. Its cool mist settled on her face like dew and the water was clean and aromatic. A narrow, muddy path, hardly six inches wide, led around the pool, over a pile of mossy rocks, and finally onto a grassy bank. She looked back and saw that the waterfall was scarcely thirty or forty feet high and perhaps equally broad, a transparent drapery that fell into a limpid basin perhaps a hundred feet across, full of water so clear that she could see the gravel and rocks at its bottom and fish swarming above them as distinctly as butterflies in the open air. There was no indication that a cave existed.

“Now what?” she asked Gyven as he joined her.

“I suppose that we need to find this Hod Tawley,” he replied.

“And how do we do that? Take out an ad? Nail notices to toadstools? Spread the word among the squirrels and nuthatches?”

“There’s no need to get sarcastic . . . ”

“Shout ‘Yoo hoo! Here we are, Mr. Tawley! Where are you?’?”

“Right here,” came the unexpected reply. Rykkla jumped in surprise, slipped on the grass and stumbled up to her calves in the water, where she tottered for a moment atop the round, slick stones, before sitting down with a splash.

“Damn everyone and everything to turtle-fornicating hell!” she cried, smacking her fist onto the surface.

“Sorry about that,” said a white light that hovered just beyond the point of her nose. She squinted and resolved within the light something that she first assumed was a variety of luminous dragonfly. As her irises adjusted the contrast, she realized that the dragonfly had only four legs, two at one end and two at the other . . . in fact, they looked a great deal more like a pair of legs and a pair of arms, all the more so since a little, egg-shaped head was cocked curiously between the latter.

“Who are you who called for Hod Tawley?” asked the dragonfly that Rykkla now knew, against a judgement that had been made considerably less skeptical since its encounter with the Kobolds, was in fact a faerie. She could see now that a pair of dark eyes, as large as a tarsier’s, were regarding her with the dispassionate, amused disinterest of a cat. They looked like the huge, wet eyes on the children in the ubiquitous velvet paintings that were sold in the street markets. They seemed to grow larger, almost imperceptibly, as she stared into them.

“My name is Rykkla,” she murmurred, “Rykkla Woxen.” She was amazed at the amount of detail that she was able to perceive in something small enough to have made a bathtub out of her cupped hand. It was only by a trick of perception, she believed, that she could so easily imagine that the faerie was gradually growing larger. How else could it fill her vision so completely? How else could she now see that the faerie was an immensely graceful little man or child, it was difficult to decide which, so elongated as to look like a figure reflected in a cylindrical mirror, yet managing not to seem disproportionate at all. More man than child, she decided, as the figure grew ever larger and she discerned details that were exciting more than her interest, and she was embarrassed to discover that she was embarrassed.

Hod Tawley’s face was as long as a swans’s egg, as translucent as a porcelain cup. His nose was small and thin, his mouth wide and cynical, his ears large and pointed. His was also nude and almost aggresively masculine. Behind him, flared in four directions like the spokes of a wheel, spread the great wings that had caused Rykkla to mistake him for a dragonfly. It was as though he were standing before a stained glass window that refracted his self-illumination, shattering it into a hundred spectral fragments that flashed, glimmered and scintillated around his central light like a firework, a sparkling pinwheel. He stretched toward her an arm that was inordinately long, that seemed to literally stretch, like vanilla taffy, and he lightly rested his spun glass fingers on her bare shoulder.

By the time Rykkla had cataloged the parts of Hod Tawley, she realized that he was indeed as large as she was, somehow having inflated himself without her having noticed. He stood in front of her, not more than three paces distant, crouched slightly, looking impossibly, implausibly thin; slender and graceful as sea grass, as the thread of smoke rising from an extinguished candle, as the gliding water moccasin.
He must be as light as smoke
, she decided
, in order to be able to stand at all. And like smoke, he cannot stand still: he wavers like a candle flame, he glows like a flame, like a hot wire; he shimmers like a sundog, like a mirage, like the afterimage of the sun in dazzled eyes, like a memory half-grasped or the lingering reverberation of an echo.

“You are a very beautiful human,” he whispered, his opaline eyes filling hers as though hers were empty cups. She realized then that what she had taken for an illusion of perception was illusory indeed, but not in the direction she had originally assumed; Hod Tawley had not become the size of a human: Ryklla had been reduced to the size of a faerie. The grass that moments before had been underfoot now soared overhead in graceful gothic arches with beads of dew suspended from the apexes like crystal chandeliers. She was nude, she noticed, and had no idea where her clothes could have gone nor when they had vanished. She could see her distorted reflection in Hod Tawley’s eyes, inverted, as elongated as himself, like a taffy girl left too long in the sun, like a stream of molten tallow winding down the side of a candle. The faerie king’s fingers danced over her body like a pair of long-legged spiders, barely brushing her skin, as though they were afraid to linger too long, as though she were too hot to bear their touch, a whispering touch that horripilated her skin, raised the fine hairs that covered her nape, arms and legs like the fizzing cat, made them quiver like iron filings under a magnet, like one of Chladni’s sonorous figures; she quivered and vibrated like a compass beneath the Northern Lights; the reed-like fingers seemed to be everywhere, dancing, skating, engaged in a gay steeplechase over landscapes of scapulae, buttocks, breasts and face; they chased each other across the flat, sandy plain of her stomach, a stomach that fluttered and rolled like a luffing sail; they explored the smooth half globes of her breasts, like navigators searching for a landfall, looking for landmarks, continents, undiscovered territories; they trickled down her legs like sap bleeding from wounded trees; they brushed through the wilderness of her pubis, like herons, geese or ospreys soaring above the dark canopy of the rainforest. A storm broke over that forest, a tempest shook and thundered its darkest depths and grottoes; a tingling electric shock, lightning like a fiery bullwhip, a whipcrack of thunder, the thunder echoing in hollow forests and canyons, a seismic tremor with rebounding, delineating shivers.

“You are very beautiful,” repeated that sultry whisper and Rykkla replied: “Princess Bronwyn told me all about this sort of thing, and I’ll thank you to stop it right now.”

The light seemed to dim: it greyed, fluttered, guttering like a candle consuming its last meager droplet of wax. The great cellophane wings folded and the faerie stepped back from the girl, crossing his arms and regarding her with an expression that was all at one and the same time quizzical, amused and angry.

“
Who
told you
what
?” he asked.

“The Princess Bronwyn, Bronwyn Tedeschiiy of Tamlaght,” Rykkla explained. “That whole long paragraph a minute ago is something I’ve heard before. She had once been nearly seduced by Spikenard and told me how easy it had almost been. It’s been pretty obvious that you’ve been trying to do the same thing to me that you tried to do to her.”

“Well, what do you want, anyway?” he said, not a little petulantly.

“Well,” replied the girl, finding a comfortable seat on the cap of a mushroom, her long legs collapsing beneath her like jackknives, “I’d like to find out more about this war between you and Spikenard.”

“What about it? What concern is it of yours?”

“It concerns me in two ways. First, the Kobolds are holding a friend of mine prisoner and won’t release him until I get you to abandon your ridiculous plan to drop the moon onto Spikenard. Second, if you
are
able to get the moon to fall to earth, it will do unimaginable damage, much more, I think, than you expect it to.”

“Oh, you think so, eh?”

“I know so.”

The faerie spread his wings suddenly and, with an angry buzz, shot straight into the air, leaving a luminous wake like a rocket. Pausing at the apex of his trajectory for a dramatic moment, he plummeted directly at her, flaming like a meteor. She tried not to flinch as he came to a halt scarce inches from where she sat, his great wings fanning her hair, but she was not entirely successful. He smelled like cinnamon.

“Just what do you think that you can do to stop me?” he laughed. “You’re part of my kingdom now, little more than an insect in your own world, less than a faerie in my own, as helpless and powerless as a naked slug. You have already succumbed to my power, almost succumbed completely, and that was only the merest trifle, a bagatelle, a whim. Can you do this?” he said as he raised himself on a whirlwind of flashing wings. “Or this?” as he drew arcane figures of colored light in the air, as though his fingertips were roman candles or white-hot irons that sizzled through the air as though it were paper. “Or this?” he said as he clutched at the atmosphere that sparkled between them and she felt something clench within her, something below her navel, something that huddled, something that writhed, something that was wrung like a sponge, something that heated within her as though the faerie had just fanned a smoldering coal.

“No, but I can do this!” she retorted, shocked, angry, and, shooting out a leg as long and straight as a pool cue, kicked the faerie in his stomach. The nearly weightless creature somersaulted, landing in the moss as a tangle of limbs and wings, sparking and fizzing like a damp firecracker. He clambered back to his feet, throwing his wings to the left and right like an impresario flamboyantly arranging his capes, but with less successful grace or dignity, and hissed at her: “Oh! you shall regret that, human!”

“I suppose you would think so. We’ll just have to see.” She hopped down from the mushroom, slapping spores from her buttocks, and took a step toward Hod Tawley who, she was gratified to see, flinched a little, though he bravely stood his ground. “Since we’re getting personal,” she continued, “you may as well know that as far as I’m concerned, you’re a miserably ignorant little insect that I’d swat without a moment’s thought or hesitation if I found you buzzing around my room. At the present, I admit that you have something of an advantage over me, but I’ll only go so far as to accept it as a momentary inconvenience.”

“Inconvenience!
I’ll show you inconvenience!”

Rykkla had scarcely a moment to consider whether she had perhaps gone a bit too far when there was a flash of light, a thump to her chest that knocked the wind from it along with a dizzying rush of sound, she felt like a concertina that had just been stepped upon. Once her senses cleared, she realized that there had been a change in venue. She was no longer beneath the grassy arches but instead in a kind of amphitheater, a mossy hollow that, so far as she could tell, might have been only a few feet across. It was night and the sky was laced with meteors.

Rykkla was lying across a smooth, cool stone in the center of a grotto, -like a kind of altar. She raised herself to one elbow, but seemed to be powerless to do more; not that she lacked the strength, but there seemed to be an odd kind of resistance that pressed back the harder she tried to move against it, as though she were imbedded in aspic.