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

cliff-like stone wall supporting Palace Island is now on their left, and the embankments of Blavek are on their right. They are almost within one of the cavernous tunnels; Bronwyn can see the parapet of the causeway only by craning her neck and looking straight up. When she does, she sees, to her horror, the pale blob of a face looking back down at her. It is topped by the distinctive plumed shako of one of Payne’s Guards. Just before the face is cut off by the edge of the tunnel as they pass within it, she hears a rasping sound and something plops wetly onto the floor of the boat alongside her foot. Then the darkness of the tunnel swallows them.
    He spat at me! Bronwyn realizes with disgust. In reality, the man had merely used some drifting débris for target practice. The Guards are animals , as I’ve always thought ; absolutely uncouth .
    The tunnel is a half-cylinder arching over the refugees, the roof perhaps twenty feet above. Chalky chandeliers of lime and calcium hang from it, dissolved and redeposited by the constantly dripping water that drizzles from fissures, cracks and seams in the vault, a drizzle that has them drenched within minutes. It takes perhaps ten of those minutes for the boat to pass from one end of the tunnel to the other, though it seems hours to Bronwyn. Finally, they emerge from the western mouth with Palace Island now behind them. The boat stops drifting, rotating idly in a slow eddy. They are 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 can have cried with fury and frustration. After all she has been through, she is back exactly from where she has started, her deadly enemies not five hundred yards away.
    There is some good in everything, if one only troubles to look for it. Bronwyn is willing to try if only because the effort involved is no greater than that required for becoming hysterical. And she normally isn’t an hysterical sort of person, at least not when it would show. She has always disliked making a public spectacle of herself and feels that tears, wails, recriminations and self-pity usually draw the kind of attention normally reserved for people who have sidewalk fits. Besides, from a practical point of view, she believes the energy spent banging her head against a wall in frustration could be better used in finding a way out of their predicament, a task she fears will not be easy. Thud, however, is in a paroxysm of remorse. When he set the princess onto the bank, she shot him a look that pierced his heart as though she had driven an icicle through it. In his efforts to help the girl he had only succeeded in making her troubles worse. Would this happen every time he tried to be kind to someone? He can’t know: she is his first experiment in kindness. Worse, Bronwyn has been one of the rare people in his life who did not look at him with automatic repugnance, nor has she treated him like an idiot, as nearly everyone else does. Now look how she has been repaid! In fact, though Thud would never have known or even suspected this, Bronwyn had been treating him not like an idiot but like a servant, accepting his services with gratitude, but at the same time with the assumption that Thud could scarcely be doing otherwise. This is what people like Thud are for , from Bronwyn’s viewpoint. Still, the finer nuances of the princess’s attitude would not have made much difference to the big man even if he had perceived them; he realizes that he is not her equal on any count, except perhaps size and physical strength, categories in which he of course vastly surpassed her; to him, her treatment implies that he possesses an equality not with her but with that vast welter of human beings who occupy the social classes beneath that of the princess and that is good enough for him. He has never been anyone’s equal before and now due to the princess he is equal to