CHAPTER II
THE ESCAPE
The city of Blavek was more than the seat of the government, it was the largest city of the island kingdom of Tamlaght. It straddled the confluence of two rivers, the Moltus, which ran down from the springs and melting snows of the rugged northwestern mountains, and its smaller tributary, the Slideen, which meandered from the lowlands, forests and farms in the west. It was the Moltus, combining the waters of both, that continued on to the small estuary that opened into the sea about one hundred miles in a straight line to the south; one hundred and fifty miles if you followed the river.
Blavek lay at the fall line; the Moltus was navigable by ships of considerable draft as far as the city, but beyond, either to the north or the west, the two rivers were shallow, rocky and interrupted by numerous waterfalls and rapids. This was particularly true of the larger river, whose first major fall was on the outskirts of the city itself. A park had been established around the falls, named for an ancient king, otherwise forgotten; they were a considerable attraction for tourists.
The city, to be truthful, had little else to recommend it, other than its size. It had been a commercial center long before it had become the home of the ruling families. Unlike the capitals of many other nations, which had been more or less built around the governmental cores and were consciously meant to be showcases, Blavek seemed a little drab, functional and uninviting. There were larger and more beautiful churches in other cities of Tamlaght, as there were more beautiful homes, larger and more attractively landscaped parks, broader boulevards, better restaurants, more exclusive shops and friendlier people. But not many.
The main city was on a long, triangular peninsula between the converging rivers. It was virtually, if not literally, built on an island, since the peninsula was nearly cut off from the mainland by a broad pool in the Moltus directly below the falls. As a short canal cut this narrow isthmus, the city had been, in fact, turned into an island artificially. The city proper was very old, a settlement of some sort having been established on the peninsula as long ago as the twenty-eighth century, and it has been continuously inhabited ever since. It became a major port for maritime commerce about four hundred and fifty years ago, and grew rapidly in size and importance after that.
As a result of its haphazard and rapid growth in a period when most of the traffic within the city was either on foot or horseback, wagon or cart, its streets are a labyrinth of meandering ways, some barely wide enough to accommodate two people abreast. In the older parts of town, the second floors of the buildings jut beyond the lower, and sometimes the third floors as well, like inverted ziggurats. The streets are so narrow that the outside walls of the upper floors of facing buildings almost meet—it would be easy to step casually from the window of one through the window of the other. This had no doubt been done often enough, and perhaps not always very casually. The streets below were little more than dark, meandering tunnels.
The buildings of the city’s business district are unprepossessing. They reflect the sober, business-minded Blavek citizen. Vast blocks of severe brick office buildings, massive stone banks and commercial institutions, rows of anonymous warehouses, long ranks of mansions, squat and grey, as undecorative and forbidding as bank vaults. All broken only by the occasional small, uninviting park or one of the many churches built in the uninspired Musrumesque style.
If the city of Blavek and its citizens seem bleak, colorless and without humor, it is perhaps because the city goes further back into the history of Tamlaght than any other (although it might be begging the question to suggest that Tamlaght actually had any other cities; small towns and large villages account for its few other urban areas). It represents more than any other place the true heart of Tamlaght. Indeed, the name of the city comes from a pair of ancient words, blavis and vekken, meaning “root” and “soul,” reflecting accurately how Tamlaghtans think of their venerable capital. And if the root and soul of Tamlaght is best expressed by a bleak, grey city, what else need be said?
The nation has never recovered from the intense xenophobia that had been inbred into its people from the earliest days of the island’s habitation. Mostly inspired by their Church, jealous and self-confident, Tamlaghtans never joined in the great renaissance of learning, science and art that had swept the Continent barely two centuries earlier. They viewed such advances with distrust and considered them immoral, unnecessary and decadent. They clung to their True Faith and the simple ways of a thousand years earlier.
As the power of the Church waned, however, eroded by the glamour radiating from the enlightened and ever more powerful nations across the Strait of Guesclin, progress was allowed—albeit reluctantly—to seep into Tamlaghtan Society. Businessmen, still fearful and mistrusting of anything foreign, had seen themselves bypassed—and growing poorer; there was no longer any market for the crude goods, unrefined and artless, of their country. Only the banking houses thrived—the dour honesty and canniness of Blavek’s bankers had attracted the rich merchants and investors of the Continent.
So the ancient hermit-city of Blavek, as the country’s only seaport, found itself in the position of also being Tamlaght’s most cosmopolitan city. Its cheap labor—uneducated, unskilled peasants lured by Blavek’s siren-song—made it attractive to those businesses whose factories turned imported materials into exported goods. Thus was created the industrial quarter of the capital city, an island of modernity in a stubborn mediaeval sea. An island regarded with an almost superstitious suspicion and contempt.
Across the Slideen to the south had grown the sprawling Transmoltus district. Here, spreading from the seed provided by the docks and shipyards, was the most modern addition to Blavek. Made possible by the invention of mechanization on the Continent and the reluctant importation of the steam engine barely a century ago, the Transmoltus was the industrial quarter of the whole nation. Here crowded scores of factories producing every conceivable product, from steel to cheap jewelry, from leather goods to clothing, from glass to furniture, from patent medicines to dairy products, from the products of slaughterhouses to coal yards. And sarcophagi, of course. Almost none of which—except the latter—were intended for domestic consumption. Virtually all of the materials were imported—though Tamlaght was certainly rich in untapped natural resources of its own—and virtually all of the products were for export.
Blavek treated the Transmoltus like a cancer—a thing to be contained. It was not about to be allowed to spread beyond its strict confines. While raw materials came in and finished products went out, the Transmoltus had no outlet for its other produce: incredibly noxious factory wastes; criminals; hungry, ignorant, jobless people; armies of street-bred urchins; the envy and loathing of the outside world.
Dreary roads, black with cinders and coke, wind around the sides of the monolithic factories. Heaps of variegated trash, which the scanty vegetation fails to cover, glance and glare like the eyes of a basilisk. The air is heavy with smoke and hangs like a pall over the lifeless earth. Not a bird nor a reptile nor an insect is to be found. Above all this rise dark masses, huge and strange, an agglomeration of regular buildings, symmetrically pierced by tall windows, and surmounted by a forest of cylindrical chimneys continually vomiting clouds of oily smoke. Red lightning flashes like fire through the black curtain that veils the sky, while a distant roaring resembles thunder or the beating of surf on a rocky shore.
The Transmoltus was dirty, smoky, loud, busy, odorous, rough, ugly and squalid. While it had made the City immensely wealthy, no one there liked to be reminded that it existed. Not one of them would have been caught dead on the south side of the Slideen, which, naturally, would have been their fate had they gone there. Even the police did not patrol the district’s streets except in pairs, and not at all at night.
The simple people of the country considered the Transmoltus an abomination, a literal outcropping of the Kingdom of the Weedking, their Hell, and treated it as anathema, avoiding looking in its direction, passing too closely to its borders or speaking its name aloud.
Lying in the broad, shallow Slideen between the City and the Transmoltus was the artificial island on which the royal palace, the houses of the Privy Council and the various chambers of the government had been established. The island spanned the river nearly from bank to bank. Over the years so many bridges and buildings had been built across the river that it now ran in tunnels beneath broad causeways.
Thud was still in the chair, which after all really did hold him, when Bronwyn woke the next morning. A slender needle of light lanced through a hole in the window’s gauzelike curtain, hitting her squarely in the left eye. She shielded that eye from the glare and could then see the mountainous silhouette of her rescuer bulking opposite. Rescuer and protector, she thought, suddenly remembering the events of the previous night. That immediately led to a recollection of the events that had preceded those, and she shuddered. Nevertheless, she had escaped with her life, had found a haven safe and warm, and now had some real hope of carrying through with her plans. She listened to the low rumbling of Thud’s breathing, like that of a dreaming tiger. With the help of a man like him, I could do it. But how to go about recruiting a man who seemed so content? His power appeared to be limitless but so did his inertia; he was more like an ox than a bull: placid and imperturbable. Then why did he risk his life to rescue me? He did it as though there had been nothing unusual about it at all; not once did he show any particular emotion, other than concern for her safety. Would he do it again?
Her eyes metaphorically roamed the room. It looked far worse in the light of morning. Her first thought was of her precious satchel. She discovered it lying next to her, against the wall. It appeared to have been left scrupulously untouched, but who could tell about such things? She felt a little guilty unbuckling the straps that held the flap closed. Beneath was a seam, tightly laced shut. Unthreading this, and opening the mouth of the bag, she pulled out one of the bundles it contained. It was tightly wrapped in oilcloth and tied with waxed string. Her wax seal over the knot seemed intact. Leaving the others uninspected, she replaced it and reclosed the bag. She continued her visual tour of the room. Her gaze stopped at the tintype surrounded by its paper flowers. It’s like an altar, she realized. She then recalled Thud’s one admission the night before when she had realized that there might be more motivating the big man than whim: he hated the Guards.
Bronwyn wriggled out of the cocoon in which she had been wrapped. The wood stove had long since gone out, but the early morning sun baking the slates of the roof had warmed the little room beneath. She stretched like a cat, up on the balls of her feet, her hands nearly reaching the ceiling, arching her back until her joints and seams cracked, one after the other. She then looked around the room to see if she could find something to wear. She noticed that the tin tub and the buckets were gone as were her old, torn clothing of the day before.
Padding softly on bare feet, she searched the room’s several corners until she found a pile of rough cloth. It turned out, when she held it up, to be one of Thud’s tunics. It looked like a tent. She slipped it over her head and it promptly fell to the floor around her feet. Barely suppressing a laugh, she went back to the bed and the blankets and found one that was about five feet square. It was riddled with moth holes. Feeling only a little guilty about destroying a possession of someone who had so few, she worked her fingers into a hole near the middle of the blanket and carefully began tearing the cloth. In only a minute or two, she had enlarged the hole enough so that she could pass her head through it. Wrapping a cord around her waist, she succeeded in creating a kind of poncho.
Now what? Did she dare try waking the sleeping giant? Why not? She touched his arm and said softly, “Mr. Mollockle?”
His bright little eyes opened immediately and he said, “Good morning. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
Thud reached for the oil stove and began pumping its lever to build up the pressure needed to light it.
“Would you like some breakfast?”
“Yes!”
It was amazing! The man awakened instantly; there had been no transition between sleep and wakefulness, whereas it had taken her several minutes to work the sleep out of her eyes and the kinks from her bones. Oh, Musrum,if only I can get this man to help me!
In just a few minutes, Thud had the fire lit and a pan full of fat canned sausages frying. After they had browned a bit, he added a can of small, sliced potatoes and an onion he had minced. The smell was wonderful and Bronwyn hoped he couldn’t hear her stomach growling eagerly in response. He had already heated water for tea in a squat tin pot. He put a pair of heaping spoonfuls of black leaves to brew in it. He produced a half-loaf of bread, full of bubbles, yeasty and crusty, and the meal was complete. Bronwyn was handed a stoneware plate, its surface crazed with brown cracks. Thud divided the food exactly in half, scooping the sausages and potatoes onto her plate. It looked far too much for her and woefully inadequate for him. He poured her tea into the same mug she had used the night before; she took it and squatted on the floor to eat. Thud had not moved yet from his place in the little chair. Everything he had done, he had done from there.
He tore a chunk from the loaf and passed it on to the girl. She tore off a smaller bit and used it to mop up some of the savory juices puddled in her plate.
“Mr. Mollockle?” she asked, around a mouthful of food. “Aren’t you curious about yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” He spoke the word as though it were a concept new to him.
“Yes. Don’t you want to know why the Guards were after me?”
“I knew I didn’t want them to get you—I don’t want them to get anyone. Why, did you get them mad?”
“Oh, Thud! Did I get them mad? You have no idea!”
“No...I guess not.”
“Do you know how many Guards there are?”
“No. A lot?”
“A lot indeed. There are ten thousand, Thud.”
“Ten thousand...I see. That’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“Thud, they’re all mad at me.”
“All of them? Why? I don’t understand.”
“Give me some more tea. It’s a long story.” And it was, indeed. Even though Thud interrupted very seldom, it was a long time before she finished. This pleased Thud, since he hated to talk while he was eating, even more than he hated to talk at any other time. He also began to think it might be the last meal he would ever have in his little home; and when she had finished he was sure of it.
This is what Bronwyn told him:
“My brother is Ferenc, the Prince of Morvane-Silenne and Heir to the throne of Tamlaght. Do you understand what that means? I’m the Princess Bronwyn. When our father, the king, died last winter—what? eight months ago already—Ferenc was the heir to the throne. When the coronation takes place in a few weeks, he will be the new king. Ferenc III. You remember when the king died? Well, maybe it really didn’t matter much to you. It probably isn’t very important to people like you; I suppose your lives go on pretty much the same no matter who’s on the throne. But believe me, it’ll be different if my brother is crowned. He’ll sit on the throne with the orb in one hand and the wand in the other, but it won’t be Ferenc who will be ruling Tamlaght. It’ll be something truly evil.
“I suppose I’d better explain from the beginning. From the time we were children, Ferenc was the weakling. Weak in body and weak in mind. He was clumsy and slow to learn. He was forever getting hurt doing the simplest things; most of my earliest memories are of him being coddled in the arms of a nurse. I often suspected him of deliberate injury just for the luxury of the attention and fawning he received. When he wasn’t hurt, he was sick, and I know those were mostly lies.
“I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so taken in by such patent fabrications—but our nurses and governesses and especially my father acted as though they thought the fate of the nation hung on every runny nose, bruise or bellyache. Although I outstripped Ferenc in every sport and study, our father treated him as if he could’ve been the country’s greatest soldier, sportsman or statesman—if only his development weren’t being delayed by these pesky illnesses and accidents. Just give the boy time, he seemed to think, and Ferenc would come into his own. Not a chance!” she snorted.
“Your brother’s not very smart, huh?”
“No, he’s not.”
“Maybe he’s too dumb to find you?”
“He is, but he’s not the problem. There’re other people who want to find me who are a lot smarter than my brother.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I’m trying to explain. You see, I’d do almost anything to prevent my brother from becoming king...in fact, I have done something. If I’m not prevented, I can not only keep my brother off the throne, but I can also rid this country of some very evil people.”
“Bad?’
“The worst. They’re the ones who’re after me, trying to stop me from exposing them.”
“Not your brother?”
“No, no, not my brother. He’s too stupid. But the people who control him are very smart. They’re not going to leave a stone in this city unturned until they find me and get back the incriminating letters I’ve taken. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“My cousin, Baron Piers Monzon, can help me if I can get to him.”
“Where is he?”
“Camped out at the northern border with his army, five hundred miles from here!”
One of the problems facing Bronwyn and Thud was that two rivers and the entire City separated them from the way north. And the only way into the City on foot was across Palace Island. That was clearly impossible. The island was crossed by a wide boulevard but this passed through four gates at either end. They would surely be heavily and warily guarded.
Thud’s plan was to cross the south river, the Slideen, by boat, simply drifting with the slow current until they reached that easternmost point of the peninsula called Catstongue. This would bring them within a few hundred yards of the bridge that connected the east part of the City with the north bank of the Moltus. It was the least direct passage between the Transmoltus and the northern roads and might be less watchfully guarded. At night, with absolutely no motion of oars or sculls to attract attention, a small boat ought to be completely invisible. With only the feeble light of the smaller moon, the river would be as black as a sheet of cast iron.
The first real difficulty they had to face was getting from Thud’s room to the docks, which were about half a mile away. Thud had no workable suggestions.
“Time is critical,” said Bronwyn. “The coronation is only three weeks away. I must get the letters to Piers before that, and with enough time for him to show them to the other barons and plan a course of action. We must be on our way tonight. We have to be on the north bank of the Moltus and on our way by tomorrow morning, at the very latest.”
“It’s after noon now. It’ll be dark in five hours. I think you need some clothes before you can leave.”
“Can you do that safely?”
“Sure. I can go anywhere: the Guards have no reason to stop me.”
“Well, all right then, but don’t be gone too long.”
“I can get some clothes from one of the women who live here.”
“How can you do that without making them suspicious? What will you tell them you need girls’ clothes for?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be ready to go at dark.” The giant turned to leave and Bronwyn caught his arm.
“Thud, I don’t know why you’re doing this...”
“Don’t worry,” he answered as he closed the door after himself. Bronwyn heard his heavy footsteps descending the groaning stairs.
Alone, she tried to carry the details of her plans further ahead than the next morning, but her imagination failed. There were a dozen ways to get to the North Country and she had no idea which might be most practical. She had seldom traveled within Tamlaght by other than first-class means and at that paid little attention to where she was going. Her usual official transport was naturally out of the question. She wasn’t altogether certain what her alternatives might be. Frustrated, she paced the room with furious energy.
The blanket-tunic, created only for modesty’s sake (in spite of the previous night’s intimacy, of which she had little recollection), began to irritate her and she pulled it over her head and tossed it aside. With great satisfaction, she scratched every place the bristly cloth had touched her body until she was covered with red welts. Pouring some water from the stoneware jug into a bowl, she washed herself with Thud’s thick alkaline soap and the itching passed. Finding a comb, and feeling a little mean about rinsing it first, she combed out her mahogany hair. Thud had not bothered to do this after he had washed it for her and it had macraméd itself into a complex, solid mass. Thus passed a pain-filled hour or so.
She then discovered that Thud, unfortunately, possessed no mirrors. She tried to use the glass in the window, but as long as it was darker in the room than outside, the window wouldn’t reflect her image—and she was in any event reluctant to get too close to it for fear of being seen. She then tried the reflective surface of the palm-sized tintype hanging on the wall surrounded by its paper garden. She could see, mirrored in the dark, shiny surface, her face framed by its usual waves of dark metallic copper. It floated in the midst of the rusty billows like a pale moon rising through a sunset sky. Of her features, she could only clearly see the pink lips of a broad, mobile mouth and the jade spheres of her eyes. An errant ray of light from the setting sun caught them and they shimmered at her like two drops of dew on a mint leaf, cold, green and liquid. By a trick of focus, she saw her face blend into the face in the photograph, then disappear, absorbed; her minty eyes, cinnamon lips and rusty hair were transformed into eyes like drops of black oil, hair like obsidian, lips of pewter and a face of silver. It was a fairy-face, of a beauty as fragile as blown glass; the eyes were full of painful sadness. Bronwyn couldn’t look into them. She couldn’t understand the question they seemed to be asking her. And she didn’t like things she couldn’t understand.
The room was getting chilly and she hoped Thud would return soon. The idea of wrapping herself in the blanket again was repellent. The lowering sun, passing through filtering billows of steam and coal smoke, lit the room with a sanguineous light. Bronwyn thought it almost unbearably depressing. She sat in Thud’s little chair, crossed her forearms on the windowsill and leaned her chin on them. Twenty yards away was the vertical brick wall of the building opposite. All of the buildings opposite Thud’s were nearly windowless; probably big, uninhabited warehouses. They were persimmon orange against the iron sky. She seemed to be on a level with the warehouse’s roof, which would put Thud’s room, it appeared, about seven or eight stories above the street.
She glanced downward. The lower two-thirds of the buildings were in darkness. This was broken only by a few sullen rectangular glows from oil lamp-lit windows further up and down the street. The street itself was visible only as a meandering purple thread. Street? There was no street below Thud’s window, she realized. The purple thread was the twilight sky reflected in a stream of water. It was as though she were on the rim of a deep, narrow, winding canyon of brick. She opened the window and leaned as far out as she dared. The brick canyon curved away from her in either direction, so she couldn’t see very far to the right or left. Looking down, she saw that a dozen windows in her own building were brightly lit. Moving shadows occasionally dimmed them. They cast wavering patterns on the opposite wall.
It was a sheer drop to the stream. She couldn’t see any doors opening onto it. She closed the window and sat back in the chair, wondering what to make of what she’d seen.
Bronwyn was not given to introspection. She had probably not once in her life ever examined her reasons for doing anything. Why should she have? There had never been any need, considering her position. To examine her motives would have been to try to justify them and her actions required no justification; and if she wasn’t answerable to herself, then certainly to no one else. Now, it was occurring to her, she was in a unique situation. She had entered into this adventure with all the self-assurance with which she had always approached any game, and now she was beginning to realize how little control she had over the events around her—not at all as her life had been up until now. It was disconcerting.
She was now in a world of which she had not been required to admit the existence...certainly not a world she had at all been prepared to deal with. The world beyond the palace walls, beyond proper, genteel, civilized Society, was as foreign and unreal as the Fairyland of her childhood. She was as unprepared to live in it as a newborn infant. If she had been successful in her old world, it was because that world had been biased in her favor. Her life had been as real as a carefully-wrought play. While she had become physically and morally strong, self-assured and intelligent, the artificial basis of these qualities had also made her grow up vain, selfish and arrogant, overconfident in her ability to take care of herself, wholly determined to direct her own fate—and, she thought a little sadly, without a genuine friend. She appreciated Thud’s help, but no one did anything for nothing. Surely he wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t realize what it might mean to him to aid a princess. There would eventually be a price, she was certain. She was almost sorry she had told him that she was the Princess Bronwyn. It would have been interesting to have seen what he would have done with some ordinary homeless, wretched urchin.
Soon she heard the heavy footsteps again. They were unmistakable, but her heart began racing nevertheless. There was no place to hide in the tiny room. She felt as vulnerable as a naked slug dimly aware of an approaching saltshaker. The door opened and the comforting bulk of her giant savior was momentarily silhouetted in the dim glow before the door closed behind him. She hadn’t realized how dark the room had become until Thud asked quietly, “Princess?”
“By the window,” she answered, and the big shadow moved toward her.
“I got clothes and some more food.” A bundle thumped onto the table. There was a scratching sound in the darkness and a flame spluttered and hissed like a skyrocket. She saw Thud’s face briefly illuminated by the winking match. It was suspended in the midst of the darkness like a smooth, expressionless moon, only the twitching shadows cast by the nervous flame giving it any life. He turned from her and lit a candle and placed it on a tin plate on the table. Lit now from below, his head disappeared into shadow, a moon eclipsed by the vast planet of his body. Bronwyn untied the bundle and a heap of tangled, multicolored cloth fell into her lap.
“I got mostly dried things, fruit and jerked meat, and some biscuits and candy. Cans’re awful heavy. And some other things. That stuff all right? I couldn’t remember how big you are.”
Bronwyn discovered how simply Thud had solved the problem of procuring women’s clothing: he had instead brought her a wide selection of boys’ clothes. And to take care of the question of fit, he had at least a dozen different sizes. Some of the garments seemed intended for an infant, while others might have fit Thud himself. But it all seemed a rather haphazard collection; all of the stockings, she saw, were of a single size, and that for someone half her age. On the other hand, all of the shirts were far too large. She hoped she would be able to piece together a complete costume fit to wear.
Discarding everything that was too small, she spread the remaining garments over the floor. It all looked hopelessly tawdry and of questionable cleanliness. Musrum! Being chased by armed Guards was one thing, but all this dirtiness...she hated dirt...And even if the clothes were clean, there was no doubt in her mind that they had been worn in the not too distant past by people who were unclean and possibly even...but here her mind veered away from the approach of the awful word diseased.
“Mr. Mollockle,” she asked, “is that a stream below this building?”
“That? It’s really a sewer. Oh, I heard that a long time ago, when this was still country, that used to be a real nice little river. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s always looked like it does now, so far as l know.”
“This stuff looks awful!” she cried, spreading the clothing across the floor. “I can’t wear these!”
“Why not?”
“Well—look! Everything’s so...ugly!”
“It looks all right to me.”
“Well, it would,” she said, unkindly.
“What can I do? It’s all I could find.”
“I suppose I haven’t any choice. Musrum! I tell you I won’t wear this stuff in daylight. I won’t do it, that’s all.”
Thud didn’t say anything for several long seconds. Then Bronwyn asked, “Do you know where the stream goes?” She had found an undervest that seemed the right size, and it was clean and soft as well. She slipped into it.
“I’m not sure. I guess it goes to the river, wouldn’t it?”
“I’d think so.” She had tossed aside three pairs of pants until she found a pair of patched knickers with black pot-metal buckles at the knees. She stood, pulled them on and buttoned up the fly. Not bad, but pretty loose around the waist. Well, one more use for the cord.
“Is there a way down to the stream?” she asked as she found a dark red shirt with a faded blue check. Perfect fit! Perhaps too perfect; fortunately there was a short, belted jacket baggy enough to hide her distinctive shape. She was slim-hipped and small-breasted, but not that slim-hipped and small-breasted.
“I don’t know. Uh, yes, I used to play down there, when I was little.” (Was that possible?) “I just don’t know if I can remember how I got down there.”
He continued shoving supplies into the same big sack in which he had carried Bronwyn the day before. His face bore its usual lack of expression.
“Did you find any shoes or boots?” Bronwyn asked, holding up her bare feet and wriggling their toes at him.
“Oh, yeah...someplace.” He burrowed into the remaining pile of goods and held up a pair of lumpy-looking short boots, tied together by their laces and looking like two elderly catfish. “I hope these fit. They’re all I could get.”
Bronwyn took them, gingerly, as dubious about their freshness as though they had been elderly fish. She pulled them on and the fit wasn’t too bad with an extra pair of socks to make up the difference. She buttoned them up.
“I think,” said Thud, “we could get down to the stream through the basement.”
“All right, then; I’ll be ready in a second.” Which she actually needed several minutes’ worth of, to braid her hair into two plaits, then to coil those tightly against the back of her head. A floppy, billed cap covered her head to the ears. She would pass for a boy—more or less—at least in the dark. Thud’s improvisational foraging had provided her, unintentionally she was sure, with a fine disguise. Thud waited for her patiently, the bag lying at his feet like a sleeping hound. She picked up her leather satchel, unbuckled it and again checked its precious contents. She felt a little silly doing that; where would they have gone? She tucked the oilcloth bundles in firmly and rebelted the bag tightly. Ducking her head under its strap, she made sure it was held snugly under her left armpit. As most people do when they know they are leaving a place forever, she gave the room an automatic, semiconscious scan; what could she have forgotten? She hadn’t had much with her. In fact, she was taking out more than she had brought in. And a strange thought briefly crossed her mind: wasn’t that the story of her life?
Her eyes rested briefly on the wall opposite the stove; the paper garden—grey, brown, umber, indigo and black in the darkness—now surrounded a rectangular patch of bare plaster, about the size of a playing card; the only thing Thud had taken from the room was his tintype.
“All ready?” she asked. At a nod from Thud, she opened the door as quietly as she could and started down the stairs. Beyond the door, the building was new to her; she had yet to see anything other than Thud’s room. The stairs were narrow, with high risers and short steps. She had to be careful not to miss her footing or topple off balance. The stairs coiled down through the building in an irregular helix. They passed half a dozen landings, each surrounded by numerous narrow doors. Some had been painted a bright color, most were bare wood, stained black in circles around their latches and unhinged edges from the touch of ten thousand unwashed hands. A few had a square of card or a piece of torn paper pinned to their center panels, or to frames, with a clumsily and painfully scrawled name proclaiming person here in block letters of crayon or charcoal. Most occupants, however, preferred or accepted or encouraged anonymity.
Finally reaching the ground floor, she found herself in a hall, flanked by psoriatic stucco walls, with a large door at the end, its glass criss-crossed with wandering sutures of tape without which it would have fallen into pieces. In the other direction, the hall vanished abruptly into darkness. Thud touched her shoulder and led her into the ammonia-reeking shadow, plaster fragments crunching under their feet. At the end of the hall, set into a corner, was a small door. Bronwyn tried its latch and found it was locked. She stepped aside for Thud. He took the latch in his fingers and bore down on it steadily, like an hydraulic press. There was a sharp crack and the latch and its lockbox popped neatly out of the door. It swung open easily, sweeping a fan of floor clean as it did. Wooden steps, set into a stone wall, led down.
Using the shelter of the open door as a shield, Thud took the lantern from his bag. It had been homemade from an empty can, with the label soaked off and metal polished, inside and out. Holes punched around its bottom seam allowed air to reach the candle and a square hole cut in the side let the light escape in a single direction, reflected from the shiny, curved inner surface. He had fashioned a conical cap out of another piece of tin and had finally attached a handle made of baling wire. It was really a very neat job. He lit the candle and replaced the little metal dunce cap. A shaft of yellow light beamed from the lantern’s square cyclopean eye.
Still without a word, Thud proceeded down the steps with Bronwyn close behind. It was a short flight that led to a small, brick-floored room. All of the walls were stone. An arched passage led to the top of another flight of steps. These also were of stone and descended much further. There was no railing and the steps were mossy, wet and rounded with use. Bronwyn hugged the damp wall, certain she was going to shoot off into the darkness with her next step onto the slimy stone, which was as slick as wet ice. She reached the bottom dizzy from holding her breath.
She found herself deep within the foundation of the building. Fat columns of roughly-cut stone supported a low, vaulted roof from which hung stalactites of dissolved mortar. The floor was grey dirt compacted to the hardness of cement. In the darkness beyond the glow of Thud’s little lantern, she could hear scuttling, scampering and a squeaking like someone twisting a wet cork in a wine bottle. She was reminded all too vividly of the cat-sized rat that had run past her face the afternoon before—she could still see its malevolent red eye, like a drop of blood, and wet yellow tusks.
Following as closely behind Thud as she could while avoiding being stepped on—which would have been disastrous—she accompanied him to one of the walls. It was pierced, she discovered, by a row of deep, square windows. She could feel air drifting in through them and could hear a faint trickling from the stream outside. The bottom edges of the holes were on a level with her chin.
“Are there bars? It’s pitch black out there—I can’t see a thing. Can we get out?”
“Well, you can, but those holes look awfully little for me.”
“You mean you think you won’t be able to squeeze through?”
“I forgot I was a lot littler the last time I came down here.” He gestured to her. “Come get in front of me. I’ll lift you up. Slide through and see if you can tell where the ground is.” Thud lifted Bronwyn onto the stone shelf. The window was about half her height in depth. She wriggled and found her head in the open air. The black earth was only a few inches below her chin. As much by its smell as by its sound she could tell that the water was only a few feet away. She pushed herself backwards and dropped into the basement.
“The ground’s almost level with the window,” she reported.
“Good,” said Thud, as he ran his hand all around the perimeter of the square opening. Suddenly, with a grunt, he hoisted himself into the hole. His broad, flat feet waggled in front of Bronwyn’s nose for a moment; then he dropped back to the ground, with an appropriate, well, thud. “It’s gonna be awful tight. Stay here for a minute.”
He vanished into the dark before Bronwyn could utter a word. Where did he think I’d go? she wondered. She could follow him by the lance of flickering light that ducked and shot around and among the black columns like a little comet. When it turned back toward her, with the looming black bulk of Thud behind it, she was reminded of the great steam locomotives she had seen in pictures (and which she desperately wanted to see in reality). Thud, she saw, had a big ball of black slime mounded in his hand with thick drools dangling from between his fingers.
“I found a leaky oil pipe,” he said by way of explanation. “Hold the light, please?” She took the tin cylinder and held its beam on him as he smeared the gelatinous substance over his equatorial circumference.
“All right,” he said, apparently satisfied with the mess he had made of himself. Once again he climbed into the window. He jammed himself in tightly, his enormous spherical rear suspended above the floor like a balloon.
“Princess!”
She heard his voice float in from one of the adjoining windows. She ran to it and lifted herself onto the slippery shelf, just barely avoiding cracking her head on the stone above. Slithering as quickly as she could, she popped her head out into the open on the other side. There was Thud’s head just a couple of yards to her left. It looked like a jack-o’-lantern sitting in a window. He called her name again. “Stop doing that!” she hissed. “Someone’s going to hear you!”
“I need your help, please,” he whispered. Bronwyn extinguished the lantern before crawling out onto the moist, gravelly soil, which was so close to the edge of the window that she was able to emerge on her hands and knees. She stood erect and hurried over to Thud. His little round head was at knee level, his arms and hands protruding on either side. “Take my hands, please,” he asked, “and pull as hard as you can. I’m only stuck a little.”
Bronwyn took one of his wrists in each of her hands, and Thud in turn gripped hers. His were so thick that even her long fingers failed to circle them. She pulled. She pulled again, so hard she could feel her face turning deep red. She released his arms with a gasp of exhaled breath. “I moved, I think,” he said “I just got to get my knees in the hole.”
She gripped him again, bracing her feet against the stone at either side of the opening. She pulled until her body was as taut as a bowstring and almost parallel with the ground. Suddenly Thud’s body came free and Bronwyn shot away from the wall like a quarrel from a crossbow. She landed squarely on her rear ten feet away with a jolt that clacked her teeth like a nutcracker. She slid backwards on the smooth, small pebbles until she came to a stop in a few inches of cold water. Her jaw ached, her coccyx felt inches shorter—she was afraid to bite down, certain that at least three inches of her spine must be protruding from her mouth—and the water was making her feel exceedingly uncomfortable.
Thud emerged from the window like a fat pupa wriggling from its egg case. He waddled over to where she sat and helped her up. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think so,” she answered, waggling her jaw. She felt as though her vertebrae were rattling like beads on a string.
“All right. Now we just follow the water.” He started off ahead of her and she had to hop and skip a few steps to catch up. Bronwyn decided then and there that she would speak to Thud at the first opportunity about this continual habit of giving her orders. He had to be made to understand that she did not take orders, and that he was making her angry. Of course, there was no real point in making an issue of the matter until they reached safety.
They kept to the scanty strip of gravel as often as they could, not wishing to make any noise by splashing water or taking the risk of a fall. The narrow ravine they were in was absolutely lightless at the bottom. Only the upper stories of the buildings, which loomed above them in dizzily vertical walls, were silverly phosphorescent in the light of the hidden moons. Directly overhead was a ribbon of indigo sky, like a blued-steel bandsaw blade . The buildings between which they were passing seemed for the most part uninhabited; probably all warehouses or factories; only an occasional ruddy light shone through the midnight walls, like a nova in a starless sky. They passed under several footbridges, which spanned the stream at various heights. They passed by the open mouths of numerous drains, pouring or dribbling their effluvia into the community sewer that the stream had become.
They had just detoured around a fat iron conduit that protruded from the wall beside them when Thud suddenly stopped with a low warning hiss and pushed Bronwyn back behind the big pipe. With an almost inaudible whisper, he said into her ear: There’s someone up ahead.
Her heart shrank, curling into a quivering little ball like a frightened hedgehog. She bent down and looked under the pipe where it cleared the bank by half a foot. She could see nothing; then, suddenly, she heard the faint, crisp sound of paper being crumpled. She looked in the direction of the sound, avoiding using her direct vision, bringing the more sensitive peripheral part of her retinae into play. Under the shadow of a footbridge...yes! The sudden flare of a match and the bearded face of one of Payne’s Guards appeared and was gone again.
She blinked and could see the negative image of the face. Thud touched her shoulder, and his breath tickled her ear. It smelled like cloves. “Wait here. Don’t move, please.”
She reached to touch him, but he was already gone. She ducked down and peered from under the rough, wet pipe. Thud had melted into the darkness. An agonizingly long moment passed; then she heard a mumbled grunt and the clatter of something metallic dropping onto the stones. Quiet again for a heartbeat and then a sharp crack, like a broomstick broken over a knee. She could guess what that sound represented and felt ill. The agonizingly long moment before seemed like nothing compared to the time it took Thud to return to her. When she heard his soft voice ask, “Princess?” she could have laughed with relief. But she was both too smart and too frightened to do that.
“I was sure surprised to find a Guard down here!” he hissed. “They must want you real bad. It was a good thing they don’t know someone’s with you.”
It certainly is! And certainly nothing like the champion I have in you, Mr. Mollockle.
The passage of only a few hundred additional yards brought them around a sharp bend and the harbor opened before them. The stream ran directly into the Slideen, and the parallel walls that had been flanking the two fugitives went right to the water’s edge. The river water lapped against the buildings’ foundations around either corner. The gravel bank had disappeared and the stream widened to fill the space from wall to wall. Thud and Bronwyn were forced to wade to get beyond the limit of the brick and stone canyon. The water only covered their ankles when they first stepped into it, but it quickly deepened. It was above Bronwyn’s knees when they reached the point where the stream actually joined the river, and above her waist when they entered the harbor. The water only came up to the top of Thud’s elephantine thighs. Turning to the right, they saw a broad ledge running along the front of the building; steep stairs rose from it to meet doors at different levels in the façade. Steps also led down into the water, apparently to allow access to boats of assorted sizes.
The anchorage beyond was a confused mass of ships and boats of every imaginable size and shape: hulls, some like massive, square black mountains, others low-slung and rakish; a jungle of masts and spars, festooned with cobwebs of rigging; smokestacks—some squat and barrel like, others like slender pipes; the enormous striding spider-shapes of cranes and derricks. Pale clouds of steam and opaque clouds of smoke drifted and shifted among the tangle like ponderous and incurious cetaceans cruising through the lightless forests of the deep.
Wharves and piers protruded into the river like the teeth on a comb, adding to the general and disorienting confusion. From the palace on the island upstream—the lights of which were visible, twinkling and merry, giving Bronwyn’s heart a painful jab as if some secret joke were being emphasized—Bronwyn had often watched the coming and going of the busy Slideen shipping. She remembered how she had spent hours on sunny afternoons or crimson evenings watching the elegant craft come and go. She would wonder where they had been, what kinds of cargos they were delivering into the warehouses, what might be in those mysteriously anonymous crates, cartons, bales, hogsheads and barrels she saw the cranes lifting from the deep wells of holds, like their feathered namesakes dipping into a pond to spear some surprised frog. True to the national distrust of anything foreign, few monarchs of Tamlaght, and fewer of its citizens, had ever wished to leave its borders, or ever had. In recent history, only the western portion of Londeac, where it bulged toward the island of Guesclin (the great island of which Tamlaght occupied the largest part), separated by the few miles of the Strait, had been visited by a Tamlaghtan ruler. And then only because until just two generations earlier, it had been a territorial possession, since ceded to Londeac, thereby saving xenophobic future monarchs the trauma of ever again having to face the possibility of having to leave the island proper.
In all her life, Bronwyn had never been farther from Blavek than the estuary at the mouth of the Moltus, scarcely one hundred miles to the south. Those visits to what seemed to be the edge of the world haunted her. The great ships that came and went—where did they come from? Where did they go when they disappeared over the horizon? The poles of the planet were as alluring to her heart as they were to the needle of a compass. She devoured geographies and never went to sleep at night without first having explored the enormous globe that swelled luminously in her room. She orbited it, trapped within its irresistible gravitation like a helpless satellite. It had been created by a master cartographer and illuminated lovingly by four monks, one of whom died before his masterpiece was complete—but much of the lovingly applied gilt and colored paint had been eroded by her traveling fingers. She had traced the routes of the great adventurers, explorers, traders and caravans. With her fingertips, she had tried to imagine what the painted deserts might really feel like, what the green tempera patches of jungle might sound like at night, what the people who lived on the banks of the mighty rivers—meandering the globe like the blue veins on a great, milky breast—looked like, how strange their tongues might sound. She tried to conjure the smells and tastes and textures represented by the cartographer’s symbols. But her imagination was never as sufficient as it was provocative.
All the ships that came and went on the Slideen, and the Moltus beyond, she thought were beautiful. She loved the functional-looking freighters: they looked boxy and gruff, with no nonsense about them, like the mustachioed, red-cheeked sergeants in the Royal Army. Some carried three or four masts but more and more were converting to steam...and she chafed for the hundredth time at having never in her life actually seen a steam engine, those wonderful symbols of the Conqueror Engineer, with her own eyes. A stumpy funnel protruded behind their wheelhouses, pouring out boiling clouds of black coal smoke that made the sun look rusty brown when it shone through them. Yet they kept their masts even though they might be as rudimentary and functionless as an ostrich’s wings. Outsiders—other than merchants—seldom came to Blavek, but on rare occasions an elegant yacht would pull into the harbor. Its hull would be as white as an iceberg, its long, low superstructure glinting with polished wood and brass. Its masts would be raked back at a slight angle—its funnels, too, if it had them—giving it an impression of speed even as it sat motionless in the midst of the river’s more mundane traffic, like a greyhound in a dog pound.
Pilot-boats and steam-launches would crawl across the grey water, leaving behind them pale wakes, like fat snails sliding over a sheet of glass. She remembered how at night she would watch the twinkling yellow lights from portholes and the bright beacons of red and green running lights that looked like stars against the dark water, shifting and changing as though Musrum were stirring the very constellations with His great forefinger.
Bronwyn looked upstream and could see the lights of the palace and the hazy, bright glow of the lamps that illuminated the boulevard that spanned the river. She hadn’t realized that the harbor would lose so much of its romance when seen close at hand at night. She felt as though she were standing at the brink of a deep and primeval forest.
“We need to find a really small boat,” whispered Thud. Which they did, shortly; a shell that looked scarcely large enough for Thud by himself. It was tied to the end of the platform by a long painter, which they used to maneuver the boat to one of the foot of one of the sets of steps. Moments later they found themselves adrift.
“When I was a kid,” whispered Thud, leaning toward Bronwyn and rocking the little boat distressingly. Bronwyn had never been a great one for swimming, let alone in the chilly, black waters of the Slideen on a starless night, and as Thud’s movement shifted the center of gravity toward her; cold water slopped distressingly over the gunwale. “When I was a kid,” he continued, “I made myself a raft from some barrels and stuff. I couldn’t steer it with paddles for nothing; it would only spin in circles. But if I just let ‘er alone, the current took me right across the river, right to Catstongue. Anything drifting in the river ends up in a big eddy there. If we just let ourselves go, we’ll be all right.”
“I can’t believe this is your big plan,” Bronwyn answered testily, forgetting that it seemed fine to her only a few hours earlier. “And I wish you’d sit still!” At that moment, a large steam-pilot passed them in the channel, its paddles thrashing the water like a vast eggbeater. The little boat spun in the wake as though it were caught in a whirlpool. Bronwyn gripped the sides until her fingers ached, and she squeezed her eyes shut, flinching at every splash of icy water that hit her. The shell was sucked into the middle of the river. The moving lights of ships were all around them, ghostly hulks, hissing steam or creaking with cables; their engines and chains clanking. Voices came over the water from all directions. Bronwyn felt like a rabbit in a herd of cattle.
“I don’t remember it being this busy,” apologized Thud.
“You were just a dumb kid thirty years ago, that’s why.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“I don’t know why we couldn’t at least have taken some oars, just in case.”
“I guess we could’ve.”
“Why aren’t we moving anymore?”
The city, to their left as they faced downstream, should have been moving to the left as the current carried them. Nor was it actually motionless, as Bronwyn thought at first; it was moving in the wrong direction.
“The river’s going backwards!” Thud whispered in surprise.
“That’s impossible,” hissed the princess.
“Well, look, then,” answered Thud, and when she looked, sure enough, they were unquestionably moving upstream.
This wasn’t possible! The river came from the mountains, it was headed to the sea; how could it be going the wrong way? The answer came to her immediately, and she felt as stupid as she ever cared to—which generally was not at all—: the tide! Blavek was at the fall line of the river, at the northernmost limit of the tidewater country. The city was virtually at sea level and when the tide came up the estuary, it backed up the water of the river as far as Blavek.
Damn! How could she have known? She was no sailor. She desperately wanted to blame Thud—it had to be someone’s fault, so why not his? This was entirely his idea, after all; the man was clearly feeble-minded; why had she ever gone along with him? It was entirely stupid on the face of it. Now look at what was happening: they were drifting directly toward Palace Island. Merciful Musrum, it was the very place from which she had been trying to escape! For all she knew, Payne and Ferenc were in one of the towers, gloating as they watched her inexorably drift toward them. She was certain they would be vastly amused, damn them.
Soon enough, the vertical stone embankment of Palace Island loomed above them. It was a peculiar sensation, looking at a place as though it were a prison that for eighteen years had been a home, more or less. She could see the towers and turrets of the palace proper and the blocks of government buildings that surrounded it. They glowed like hot bricks in the light of the boulevard’s gas lamps. She could see figures moving regularly along the parapet’s edge, not fifty feet over their heads: Guards on patrol. The little boat rounded the northeast corner of the island. Ahead of them yawned four vast, black mouths—the openings to the tunnels that allowed the Slideen to pass beneath the causeway. Above the tunnel mouths were the bright lights lining the roadway, and the dimmer, golden lights in the windows of the official mansions, offices and palaces built over the river. She could see the busy shadows of people and vehicles. When will someone finally see us and raise the alarm? She felt as obvious as a clown in church. They were now in a narrow channel, only a hundred yards wide; the cliff-like stone wall supporting Palace Island was now on their left, and the embankments of Blavek were on their right. They were almost within one of the cavernous tunnels; Bronwyn could see the parapet of the causeway only by craning her neck and looking straight up. When she did, she saw, to her horror, the pale blob of a face looking back down at her. It was topped by the distinctive plumed shako of one of Payne’s Guards. Just before the face was cut off by the edge of the tunnel as they passed within it, she heard a rasping sound and something plopped wetly onto the floor of the boat alongside her foot. Then the darkness of the tunnel swallowed them. He spat at me! Bronwyn realized with disgust. The man had just used some drifting débris for target practice. The Guards were animals, as I’ve always thought; absolutely uncouth. The tunnel was a half-cylinder arching over the refugees, the roof perhaps twenty feet above. Chalky chandeliers of lime and calcium hung from it, dissolved and redeposited by the constantly dripping water that drizzled from fissures, cracks and seams in the vault, a drizzle that had them drenched within minutes. It took perhaps ten of those minutes for the boat to pass from one end of the tunnel to the other, though it seemed hours to Bronwyn. Finally, they emerged from the western mouth with Palace Island now behind them. The boat stopped drifting, rotating idly in a slow eddy. They were only a few yards from a weedy bank on the City side of the river. Thud climbed out of the boat, sinking nearly to his waist, and pulled it and Bronwyn to the shore. Bronwyn could have cried with fury and frustration. After all she had been through, she was back exactly from where she had started, her deadly enemies not five hundred yards away.