A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Read Online Free PDF Page B

its shores, whose only purpose was confinement. She never equated the thundering of breakers with the sound of a prisoner beating against the door of her cell.
    Gyven’s interest in travel had waned once he and the princess had arrived in Londeac. She had supposed that anyone who had spent the first thirty-odd years of his life buried in a cavern would be anxious and curious to see what the outside world was like. Certainly, at first, Gyven seemed to be fascinated with every aspect and variety of the continent’s landscapes. But it was as though his world gradually inverted upon him; he developed more of a claustromania than an agoraphobia. He grew ever more taken with visiting caves, grottoes, basements, cellars, quarries and excavations and, eventually, mines, tunnels and caissons.His great knowledge of geology and mineralogy was sought out and appreciated by the engineers involved and the sudden demand for his advice as an expert consultant was his plausible and reasonable excuse for accepting every one of their invitations.
    His visits to Toth and the palace became infrequent; when he was home he was distracted, dreamy, incommunicative. He seemed only aware of Bronwyn when she made love to him . . . which she came to realize was just another manifestation of that invisible, mysterious impediment: she had for a long time been having sex with him; she wasn’t certain exactly when they had ceased making love.
    Gyven had been gone now for an entire month, his longest absence yet and the first during which she had no idea where he had gone. He had merely disappeared one morning and there had been no word since. The disturbing thought was that she had begun to wonder if she even missed him. And if she did, did she miss him , or did she just miss his solidity, as a ship might miss its anchor? Never did she give even so much as a passing thought to returning to her homeland. Within days of her abdication, in fact, before the last of Tamlaght disappeared beyond the horizon, as her ship anxiously steamed for Londeac, the armies of Crotoy poured unhindered across the northern border and occupied that relatively uninhabited quarter. A desultory kind of war was now being raged in which the small, poorly-equipped, -supplied and -trained Crotoyan army was faced only by the already ravaged and weary people of Tamlaght, something like a normally inocuous disease being able to overcome a dibilitated body. The results of Payne Roelt’s reign of terror had already depressed the princess enough and she had no particular desire to see her country and its people even further devastated. The answer that seemed perfectly adequate to her was to turn her back on the whole unpleasant mess.
    There was the sound of a gong and one of the swans honked either in reply or in protest. It was the signal that the luncheon hour had arrived and the workers were allowed to take their break. She sighed again, stood and stretched. She was a very tall young woman, a little over twenty years old, who when stretched as she was at full length could easily let her fingertips touch a point (had there been one available) considerably more than eight feet over her head. She was inordinately leggy (the professor had once calculated that they comprised 57% of her total length), as sleek and supple as a strand of kelp, with the hydrodynamic streamlining of an eel or barracuda. She had a lean, pale face that was home to eyes as metallic green as a pair of bottle flies. Except in coloring and some more or less minor physical details, she greatly resembled at least as a general type her friend Rykkla Woxen, perhaps in the same way a greyhound resembles a coyote. Like Rykkla, the princess was abnormally tall, snakily athletic (undeservedly so, for unlike Rykkla she loathed physical exercise), with an aquiline nose set as firmly as a dolmen in an angular, bony face. The net effect was rather sharp and hawkish. Her mouth was wide, with perhaps just the slightest hint of an