A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter Read Online Free PDF Page A

functional and uninviting. There are larger and more beautiful churches in other cities of Tamlaght, as there are more beautiful homes, larger and more attractively landscaped parks, broader boulevards, better restaurants, more exclusive shops and friendlier people. But not many. As most national capitals are a kind of distillation of the best of their respective nation’s art and culture, so Blavek’s drabness is representative of Tamlaght as a whole.
    The main city sits on a long, triangular peninsula between the converging rivers. It is virtually, if not literally, built on an island, since the peninsula is 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 has been, in fact, turned into an island artificially. The city proper is 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 haphazard and rapid growth during 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 has no doubt been done often enough, and perhaps not always very casually. The streets below are little more than dark, meandering tunnels.
    The buildings of the city’s business district are unprepossessing. They reflect the sober, business-minded, devout 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 has any other cities; towns and large villages account for its few other settled 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