Read Online A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter by Ron Miller - Free Book Online

go when they disappeared over the horizon? The poles of the planet are as alluring to her heart as they are 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 would orbit 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 real 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 feels as though she is standing at the brink of a deep and primeval forest.
    “We need to find a really small boat,” whispers Thud. Which they do very soon; a shell that looks scarcely large enough for Thud by himself. It is tied to the end of the platform by a long painter, which they use to maneuver the boat to the foot of one of the sets of steps. Moments later they find themselves adrift.
    “When I was a kid,” whispers 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 shifts the center of gravity toward her; cold water slops distressingly over the gunwale. “When I was a kid,” he continues, “I made myself a raft from some barrels and stuff. I