and it is better, perhaps, that it has come about this way.” The mage’s arm, unexpectedly strong, steadied Hawkwood as he swayed. “Be careful, Captain. We don’t want anything springing its seams again.”
“Ortelius,” Hawkwood was saying, ignoring him. “I can’t believe it.”
“Yes, who would have? An Inceptine cleric also a werewolf! That raises many questions, Captain, both for us on board ship and for the great and the good back home. I have this feeling that we have overlooked something, in our pride and our wisdom. There is something deep down in our society which we had not thought to find. Something abominable.”
“Mateo, ere he changed, said his master was high in a society. I don’t think he meant the one we know.”
“We may find some answers in the west, I suppose. I do not see this as a voyage of discovery any longer, Captain, or an attempt at colonization. It is more of an armed reconnaissance. Murad concurs.”
“The west. You think—?”
“That it is inhabited? Yes, but by what manner of men or beasts or both I know not.”
Hawkwood swung his legs off the hanging cot. He could manage the pain now. It came and went like a tide. His right arm was strapped tightly to the side of his chest, unbalancing him.
“How bad is this?”
“The thing bit your collar-bone clean through, and mangled the ends of the bone. I have been cleaning the wound, removing the splinters. A couple of the oldwives have sat with me and kept wound-sickness at bay. It smells sweet enough and I think we have brought it off, but you will have a terrible scar and a lump, and your right arm will never be as strong again.”
But I’m alive, Hawkwood thought. That is something. And my ship is afloat; that is something more.
He was wearing only a clout of linen about his loins and his legs seemed oddly pale to him, the feet a long distance away. He stared at them absently, and then a jet of fear thrilled him.
“Bardolin, the beast bit me. Does that mean I have its disease? Will I change?”
“The black disease is not contagious in the way people think. It is not carried in a bite.”
“But Ortelius made a werewolf of Mateo.”
“Yes. That intrigues me, I must admit. Fear not, Captain, whatever arcane and bloody initiation turned the ship’s boy into a shifter was not practised on you. Men do not catch lycanthropy from a bite, no matter what the superstitions say. Gregory confirms it, and my old master, Golophin, believed it also. There is something more at work which we cannot yet understand.”
Relieved somewhat, Hawkwood relaxed. “Why did he do it? Why did he do that to poor Mateo?”
“My guess is he needed help. He had seen how determined we were to continue west and was set on wiping out the three of us—you, Murad and I. To do that swiftly and in one swoop, he would need a fellow conspirator. He may also have been . . . lonely. Who knows? I cannot lay claim to any great insights into the souls of shifters, for all that I knew Griella better than most. There is a mystery in them that has to do with the relationship between the man—or the woman—and the beast.” He halted and smiled wryly. “My apologies. I had not intended to confront you with a treatise.”
“You knew—you knew what she was before ever she came aboard.”
“I knew, may God forgive me. I was a little in love with her also, you see. I thought I could control her. I even had wild ideas of curing her. But that is done with. I will have it on my conscience.”
“It’s all right. It’s over with anyway—for the best, maybe. Tell me, how long has it been since the fire and the rest? How long have I been on my back?”
“Eight days.”
“Eight days! Sweet Saints in heaven! Help me to my feet, Bardolin. I must talk to Velasca. I must check our course.”
Bardolin pushed him gently but inexorably back on to the cot.
“Velasca, it seems, knows how to sail due west, and the wind has been as steady as you please. I will send him down to you if you desire, but you are not going anywhere. Not for a while yet.”
Hawkwood sank on to the blankets once more. His head was spinning.
“Very well. Send him down at once, and get someone to help me dress, will you? And send Chips, too. I want to talk to him about the repairs.”
“All right, Captain. I’ll get them down as soon as I may.”
Bardolin left him, frowning.
Eight days. They might be within a sennight of reaching land, if Velasca had kept to his course. They were going to do it. Hawkwood could feel it in his mangled bones. He could feel the land, bulking somewhere on some unconscious horizon illuminated only by a mariner’s intuition. It was there, and they were closing on it with every hour the carrack ploughed on before the kindly wind.
M URAD stood at the break of the quarterdeck with his officers on either side, his stance adjusting itself automatically to the roll of the ship. His long lank hair was flying free and he was dressed in his black riding leathers. His rapier hung scabbarded by his side. Though his face was white as chalk, the scar that furrowed one hollow cheek seemed to have been kindled by the wind into a blazing carmine and his eyes were as dark as sloes.
The waist was packed with people, the gangways lined with watching soldiers. Nearly all the ship’s company were present for punishment.
“Carry on, Sequero,” Murad said tonelessly.
Sequero stepped forward to the rail. “Sergeant Mensurado, bring the man forward.”
There was a boil of activity in the waist. Mensurado and two other soldiers thrust through the throng with a fourth man whose hands were tied behind his back.
“Read the charges, Ensign.”
Sequero called out in a clear voice so the assembled company could hear:
“Gabriello Habrar, you are charged that on the eleventh day of Endorion in the year of the Saint five hundred and fifty-one, you did in the forecastle of the carrack
Sequero paused and glanced at Murad. The lean nobleman nodded curtly.
“You are therefore sentenced to the strappado. Sergeant Mensurado, carry on. Drummer.”
A harsh, dry drumming began as one of the soldiers started to ply the goatskin of his instrument. A sailor perched on the main yardarm let down a rope which Mensurado and his comrades fastened to the wrists of the accused man. The other end of the rope was thrown to the soldiers on the gangway.
Murad lifted a hand.
The bound man was hauled into the air by the wrists, his hands at a horrible angle up his back and his shoulder-blades protruding grotesquely. He screamed in agony, but the rasping drumroll smothered the sound. Then he dangled, kicking and twisting. After a few minutes the screaming stopped and he swayed on the end of the rope like a sack of meat, his eyes bulging, blood trickling from his bitten tongue.
“Cut him down,” Murad ordered, and turned away from the sight to a contemplation of the carrack’s wake. Sequero and di Souza went to him.
“I will have discipline,” Murad said coldly. “You, gentlemen, have not been doing your job. The men are muttering and mutinous. I will have that out of them if I have to flog and strappado every last one of the dastards. Is that clear?”
Di Souza mumbled an agreement. Sequero did not speak, but his eyes were blazing.
“Have you something you wish to say, Ensign?” Murad demanded, turning on his aristocratic subordinate.
“Only that if you strappado every man in the tercio we’ll have damned few fit to shoulder an arquebus when finally we hit land,” Sequero said, not one whit intimidated by the snake-blank eyes of his superior officer.
Murad stared at him for a long moment, and the ensign blenched but stood his ground. Finally a smile twisted the older man’s face.
“I would sooner have a maimed man who is loyal than a fit one who is not,” he said quietly. “It would seem, Sequero, that you are developing some regard for your fellow men, scum from the bottom of the heap though they might be. Perhaps this voyage is teaching you the compassion of a commoner or a Mendicant Friar. If at any stage your burgeoning sympathy for the common soldiery interferes with your duty and your loyalty to your superior and your king, you will, I am sure, be the first to let me know.”
