A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online

thread barely wavers from the vertical.
    Bronwyn stares at the sudden appearance of the stars. She immediately finds the Parallelogram and from that her eyes sweep outward in an ever-broadening spiral. She had once been as absorbed by the geography of the heavens, which is all that astronomy is, or at least so far as her Tamlaghtan education had been concerned, as she was by the geography of the earth. When she had commited to memory virtually every square inch of her enormous terrestrial globe, as pale and blue-veined as some vast breast: a spherical, geodesic, topographic mammary upon which her far-ranging imagination have suckled, she turned to the blue-black globes that hovered in the chambers of her brother’s tutors. Speckled with silvery stars and bound by golden lines, the constellations mirror images of their familiar shapes, the globes were universes turned wrong side out. She felt as Musrum must feel, looking at his creation from the Other Side and being amazed and amused at how small and self-contained they seemed to be.
    She easily identified other, nearby constellations, the Rabbit, the Eggbeater, St. Wladimir, Musrum’s Nose, the Greater and Lesser Milkcans, and recalled how she had spent many nights on a palace parapet recasting the ancient sky drawings. There is, she feels, nothing official about them, they are merely the result of a few centuries of bored shepherds playing connect-the-dot. She thinks that the Rabbit looks a good deal more like a race horse and, if she combined some of the Oxcart with most of the Eyedropper she can imagine a grand sloop cutting through the stars, leaving a milky wake in its silent passing.
    “Fifty-two degrees!” the professor cries, checking the mark he has just made on the edge of his paper protractor, then immediately replaces it to his eyes. “Fifty-three degrees,” he says after repeating the process, then: “Fifty-two! Fifty-two! Flfty-three!” Then: “Gone! The clouds have come back again.”
    “Fifty-two or fifty-three degrees,” says the princess, as a dark curtain closes over her clinquant theater. “Does that tell you where we are?”
    “Only along a line running east and west,” replies the professor. “That is, I know only approximately how far we are from the equator.”
    “Well,” put in Basseliniden, “we know we surely must be somewhere between the peninsula of Piotr and the east coast of Guesclin.”
    “Oh, we can narrow it down a little more closely than that. Most of the north shore of Londeac lies at or above fifty-two degrees north latitude. Surely if we are east of, say, fifteen degrees of longitude, or so, we would either be within sight of land or on land itself. The same goes for the west. If we are as far in that direction as ten or eleven degrees, once again we would be in sight of land. I can think of only one place that would allow us to be at sea as far south as fifty-two or three degrees.”
    “And that is?” asks the princess.
    “Guesclin Bay.”
    The princess frowns for a moment, consulting her mental atlas. “Guesclin Bay?” she repeats. “Guesclin Bay? Why, that’s the entrance to the Strait!”
    “Oh yes, indeed it is!”
    “Holy Musrum!” she mutters, in absolute awe at the perversity of her fortune.

CHAPTER THREE
    DESPERATE STRAITS
    The Strait of Guesclin is narrow enough for much of its length to be perhaps better called a river, especially since, year round, a powerful current sweeps the cold waters of the Mostaza Sea into the warmer waters of the ocean to the south. It is in form a vast, precipitous canyon, a rift between the continent of Londeac and the island of Guesclin, as though the single landmass have been torn apart, like a ripped map or a shared cookie. In actual fact, this is precisely what had happened, or, more accurately, what is in the process of happening. Vast forces deep within the planet are graduaily and inexorably tearing the single continental mass asunder and, as the geologists of