Merduk cavalry had shadowed the mass of moving people ever since they had left Aekir’s flaming gates, but had not closed. They were monitoring the progress of the fleeing hordes, channelling them along the Searil road like so many sheep. Leagues to the rear, it was said, Sibastion Lejer and eight thousand of the surviving garrison were fighting a hopeless rearguard battle against twelve times their number. The Merduk would let the noncombatants escape, it seemed, but not what was left of the Torunnan army.
Which makes me an absconder, a deserter, Corfe thought calmly. I should be back there dying with the others, making an end worth a song.
The thought raised a sneer on his face. He bit into the wood-hard turnip.
Children crying in the gathering darkness, a woman keening softly nearby. Corfe wondered what they would find when they got to the Searil line, and shook his head when he considered the enormity of the task awaiting its defenders. Like as not the Merduk would strike when the confusion of the refugee influx was at its height. That was why Lejer and his men were making their stand, to buy time for the Searil forces.
And what will I do when I reach the river? he wondered. Offer my services to the nearest tercio?
No. He would trek on west. Torunna was done for. Best to keep going, across the Cimbric Mountains, perhaps, and into Perigraine. Or even further west, to Fimbria. He could sell his services to the highest bidder. All the kingdoms were crying out for fighting men these days, even men who had run with their tails between their legs.
That would be giving up any dream of ever finding his wife again.
She is dead, Corfe, an empty-eyed corpse in a gutter of Aekir.
He prayed it was so.
There was a commotion in the firelit gloom, movement. His hand strayed to his sabre as a long line of mounted shapes came looming up. Cavalry, all light and shadow as they wound through the dotted campfires. People raised hands to them as they passed. It was a half-troop heading east, joining Lejer’s embattled command, no doubt. They would have a devil of a time fighting their way through the Merduk screen.
Something in Corfe stirred. He wanted momentarily to be riding east with them, seeking a hero’s oblivion. But the feeling passed as quickly as the shadowed horsemen. He gnawed on his turnip and glared at those who peered too closely at his tattered livery. Let the fools ride east. There was nothing there but death or slavery and the burning ruins of an empty city.
“T HERE is a rutter, a chart-book, that will confirm the man’s story,” Murad told the King.
“Rutters can be forged,” Abeleyn said.
“Not this one, Majesty. It is over a century old, and most of it details the everyday passages of an everyday oceangoer. It contains bearings and soundings, moon changes and tides for half a hundred ports from Rovenan of the corsairs to Skarma Sound in far Hardukh, or Ferdiac as it was known then. It is authentic.”
The King grunted noncommittally. They were seated on a wooden bench in his pleasure garden, but even this high above the city it was possible to catch the reek of the pyre. The sun beat down relentlessly, but they were in the dappled shade of a stand of mighty cypresses. Acacia and juniper made a curtain about them. The grass was green and short, a lawn tended by a small army of gardeners and nourished with a stupefying volume of water diverted from the city aqueducts.
Abeleyn popped an olive into his mouth, sipped his cold wine and turned the crackling pages of the old chart- book with delicate care.
“So this western voyage is authentic also, this landfall made in the uttermost west?”
“I believe so.”
“Let us say you are right, cousin. What would you have me do about it?”
Murad smiled. His smile was humourless, wry. It twisted his narrow face into an expression of knowing ruefulness.
“Why, help me outfit a voyage to test its veracity.”
Abeleyn slammed the ancient book shut, sending little flakes of powder-dry paper into the air. He set one long-fingered hand atop the salt-stained cover. Sweat beaded his temples, coiling his dark hair into tiny, dripping tails.
“Do you know, cousin, what kind of a week I’ve had?”
“I—”
“First I have this God-cursed—may the Saints forgive me—holy Prelate with his putrefactive intrigues in search of more authority; I have the worthy merchants of the city crying on my shoulder about his—no,
Murad sipped wine. “I did not say that you should provide the ships, Majesty.”
“Oh, they’ll spring out of the yards fully rigged, will they?”
“I could, with your authority, commandeer some civilian ships—four would suffice—and command them as your viceroy. A detachment of marines is all I would have to ask you for, and I would have volunteers aplenty from my own tercio.”
“And supplies, provisions, equipment?”
“There is any amount of that locked up in warehouses all along the wharves—the confiscated property of arrested merchants and captains. And I know for a fact that I could crew half a flotilla from the foreign seamen currently languishing in the palace catacombs.”
Abeleyn was silent. He stared at his kinsman closely.
“You come here with some interesting notions under your scalp along with the tomfoolery, cousin,” he said at last. “Maybe you will overreach yourself yet.”
Murad’s pale countenance became a shade whiter. He was a long, lean nobleman with lank dark hair and a nose any peregrine would have been proud of. The eyes suited the nose: grey as a fish’s flank, and with something of the same brightness when they caught the light. One cheek was ridged with a long scar, the legacy of a fight with one of the corsairs. It was a surpassingly ugly, even sinister face, and yet Murad had never lacked the companionship of the fairer sex. There was a magnetic quality about him that drew them like moths to a candle flame until, burnt, they limped away again. Several of their outraged husbands, fathers and brothers had challenged Murad to duels. None had survived.
“Tell me again how you came by this document,” Abeleyn said softly.
Murad sighed. “One of my new recruits was telling tall tales. His family were inshore fishermen, and his great-grandfather had a story of a crewless ship that came up out of the west one day when he and his father were out on the herrin run. His father boarded with three others, but a shifter was on board, the only thing living, and it killed them. The ship—it was a high-seas carrack bound out of Abrusio half a year before—was settling slowly and the yawlsmen drew off. But the shifter jumped overboard and swam for shore. They reboarded to collect their dead and the boy, as he was then, found the rutter in the stern cabin along with the corpse of the master and took it as a sort of were-gild for his father’s life.”
“How old is this man?” Abeleyn demanded.
Murad shifted uncomfortably. “He died some fifteen years ago. This is a tale kept by the family.”
“The mutterings of an old man garbled by the passage of time and the exaggerations of peasant storytelling.”
“The rutter bears the story out, Majesty,” Murad protested. “The Western Continent exists, and what is more the voyage there is practicable.”
Abeleyn bent his head in thought. His thick, curly hair was hardly touched by grey as yet. A young king fighting against encroachments on his authority from the Church, the guilds, other monarchs. His father had had no such problems, but then his father had not lived to see the fall of Aekir.
We live in trialling times, he thought, and smiled unpleasantly.
“I do not have the time to pore over an ancient rutter, Murad. I will take what you have told me on trust. How many ships did you say you would need?”
