Hawkswood's Voyage

“You have plunged the west into war at a time when she is already fighting for her life,” Cadamost said.

“No,” Lofantyr told him hotly. “Torunna is fighting for her life. My kingdom, my people—we are the ones who are dying on the frontier. You here know nothing of what we have suffered, and you have cared less. The true Pontiff resides in Ormann Dyke at the heart of the struggle to defend the west. He is not sitting in Charibon issuing edicts that will send thousands to the pyre. I tell you this: before I am done, I will see this Himerius burned on the same pyre he has already burned so many innocents upon.”

There was a shocked stillness. The men sitting at the table had an air of disbelief about them, as though they could not quite credit what they had heard.

“Leave this city,” Cadamost said finally, his face white as paper and his eyes two red-limned orbs. “Leave it as kings in due state, for once Charibon hears of this you will be beyond the Church and every right-thinking man’s hand will be turned against you. Your anointed right to rule will be stripped from you and your kingdoms declared outlaw states. No orthodox ruler need fear retribution if he invades your borders. Our faces are turned against you. Go.”

The three kings left their places and stood together. Before they started for the door, Abeleyn turned round one last time.

“It is Himerius we defy. We harbour no ill-will towards any other state or ruler—”

Haukir snorted derisively.

“—but if any seek to injure us without good cause, then I swear this to all of you: our armies will seek redress in the blood of your subjects, our fleets will make unending infernos of your coasts and we will show less pity to our foes than the blackest Merduk sultan. You will rue the day and hour you crossed swords with Hebrion, or Astarac, or Torunna. And so, gentlemen, we bid you good day.”

The three young men, all kings, turned and left the chamber together. In the silence that followed, the Himerian kings, as they would come to be known, stared at the round table which had witnessed their conclave and the dissolution of the Five Kingdoms. The path of history had been set; all they could do now was follow it and pray to God and the blessed Ramusio for guidance on their journey.

TWENTY-FIVE

T HE north-easter stayed with them, as steady and as welcome as the Hebrian trade. Hawkwood could feel the constant thrumming of its power on the ship as though it were acting on the marrow of his very bones. The Osprey was alive, afloat, running before the wind. His mind relaxed and wandered off to that other place once more.

H E was a boy again, at sea for the first time on the clumsy caravel which had been the first Hawkwood- owned ship. His father was there, shouting obscenities at the straining seamen, and the white spray was coming aboard in packets as the vessel ran before the wind on the peridot-green swells of the Levangore. If he looked aft he could see the pale, dust-coloured coast of Gabrion with the darker rises of forests among the inland hills; and to larboard were the first islands of the Malacar Archipelago, floating like insubstantial ghosts in the haze of heat that had settled on the horizon.

Up and down, up and down the bow of the caravel went, the green waves like shimmering walls looming up and retreating again, the gulls screeching and calling and dropping guano over the deck, the rigging straining and creaking in time to the working timbers of the ship, and the blessed wind they had harnessed bellying out the booming and flapping sails.

This, he had thought, is the sea. And he had never questioned his right to be on it; rather he had welcomed his craft as a man would his wife.

H AWKWOOD could not move. He was drenched in sweat and as immobile as a marble caryatid. There was an unfamiliar smell in his nostrils. Burning.

A vast shudder as the ships came together, their hulls crunching and colliding.

“Fire!” Hawkwood yelled, and along the deck the men whipped the smoking slow-match across the touch- holes of the guns. Like a rippling thunder they exploded in sequence, leaping back on their carriages like startled bulls. There was an enormous noise, unlike any other. Louder than a storm-surf striking a rocky shore or a tempest in the heights of the Hebros. The whole starboard side of the ship disappeared in smoke and fire. Only men’s screams and the shrieking of the blasted timbers carried above the roar.

The corsairs fired their own broadside, the muzzles of their culverins touching the very side of the carrack. They elevated the muzzles so the shot plunged upwards through the deck. The air exploded, became full of jagged shards of wood which ripped men apart, flung them clear across the deck or tossed them overboard like gutted fish. Hawkwood clambered on to the starboard quarterdeck rail and raised the heavy cutlass above his head. “Now, lads, at them. Boarding parties away!”

And then he leapt on to the crowded slaughterhouse of the enemy ship.

“R ICHARD!’ she cried as he pushed into her, expending himself, driving her backbone into the stuffed softness of the bed. The sweat dripped off his face to land on her collar-bone and trickled between her breasts. Jemilla grinned fiercely up at him, her body answering his, struggling against him. The sweat was a slick glue between them so their skins sucked and slid as they moved together and apart, like a ship breasting a heavy swell, the keel burying itself in each wave.

B UT the heat. His body was on fire, lying in a pool of liquid metal, every movement a torment, every pore oozing his life’s fluid. The heat squeezed the water out of him until he was as dry and withered as the salted fish they had barrelled in the hold. If he moved he would crackle and creak and break apart into fragments as fine and desiccated as ash.

“Richard.”

He opened his eyes.

Bardolin smiled. “So you have returned from your voyaging at last.”

The ship moved about him, a lulling presence. He sensed that the wind was fine and steady on the quarter, a fresh breeze pushing them ever westwards. In the almost-quiet he heard the ship’s bell struck three times, and the noise was incredibly comforting, like hearing the sound of a familiar voice.

He turned his face to one side and immediately the pain began, a molten glow that was centred deep in his right shoulder. He groaned involuntarily.

“Easy.” The mage’s strong fingers steadied his head, grasping his chin.

“The fire,” he croaked.

“We got it under control. The ship is safe, Captain, and we are making good progress.”

“Help me sit up.”

“No. You—”

“Help me up!”

The pain came and went in sobbing waves, but he blinked and ground his teeth until it was a bearable presence, something he could live with.

Their surroundings were unfamiliar to him. A small cabin, with a culverin squatting against one wall.

“Where is this?”

“The gundeck. The carpenter rigged up some partitions for you. You needed the peace.”

So. He recognized it now, but it was strangely silent, as though the deck were almost deserted. He could hear many feet thumping above his head, and voices murmuring.

“The fire. The stern cabin—”

“More or less patched up. Chips has been working like a man possessed. We have no new glass for the stern windows though, so they must be shuttered most of the time.”

“The log. Bardolin, did the log survive?”

The mage looked grim. “No. It went in the fire, as did most of your charts and the old rutter.”

“Griella?”

“She is at peace. I was wrong ever to bring her on this voyage, and yet she saved our lives, I think. Murad’s, anyway. It is hard to know. A hard thing to have done.”

“She loved him.” It could have been question or statement.

“In her own way, yes. But no good would have come of it. They would have destroyed each other in the end