to obtain anything for them through the regular military channels. They were on their own. But they were his men.
PART TWO THE WESTERN CONTINENT
T HE air was different, somehow heavy. It trickled down their throats and through the interstices in their armour and lodged there, a solid, unyielding presence. It ballooned their lungs and crimsoned their faces. It brought the sweat winking out in glassy beads on their foreheads. It made the soldiers pause to tug at the neck of their cuirasses as though they were trying to loosen a constricting collar.
The white sand clung to their boots. They screwed up their eyes against its brightness and slogged onwards. In a few steps, the boom of the surf out on the reef became distant, separate. The sun faded as the jungle enfolded them, and the heat became a wetter, danker thing.
The Western Continent.
Sand gave way to leaf mulch underfoot. They slashed aside creepers and the lower boughs of the trees, sharp palm fronds, huge ferns.
The noise of the sea, their universe for so long, faded away. It was as if they had entered some different kingdom, a place which had nothing to do with anything they had known before. It was a twilit world enshadowed by the canopy of the immense trees which soared up on all sides. Naked root systems like the tangled limbs of corpses on a battlefield tripped them up and plucked at their feet. Tree trunks two fathoms in diameter had discs of fungi embedded in their flanks. A bewildering tangle of living things, the very atmosphere full of buzzing, biting mites so that they drew them into their mouths when they breathed. And the stink of decay and damp and mould, overpowering, all-pervading.
They stumbled across a stream which must have had its outlet on the beach. Here the vegetation was less frenetic and they could make a path of sorts, slashing with cutlass and poniard.
When they halted to rest and catch their breath—so hard to do that here, so hard to draw the thick air into greedy lungs—they could hear the sound of this new world all around them. Screeches and wails and twitterings and warblings and hoots of human-sounding laughter off in the trees. A symphony of invisible, utterly unknown life cackling away to itself, indifferent to their presence or intentions.
Several of the soldiers made the Sign of the Saint. There were things moving far up in the canopy, where the world had light and colour and perhaps a breeze. Half-glimpsed leaping shadows and flutterings.
“The whole place is alive,” Hawkwood muttered.
They had found a tiny clearing wherein the stream burbled happily to itself, clear as crystal in a shaft of sunlight which had somehow contrived to survive to the forest floor.
“This will do,” Murad said, wiping sweat from his face. “Sergeant Mensurado, the flag.”
Mensurado stepped forward, his face half hidden in the shade of his casque, and stabbed the flagpole he had been bearing into the humus by the stream.
Murad produced a scroll from his belt pouch and unrolled it carefully as Mensurado’s bark brought the file of soldiers to attention.
“ ‘In this year of the Blessed Saint five hundred and fifty-one, on this the twenty-first day of Endorion, I, Lord Murad of Galiapeno do hereby claim this land on behalf of our noble and gracious sovereign, King Abeleyn the Fourth of Hebrion and Imerdon. From this moment on it shall be known as—’ ” he looked up at the cackling jungle, the towering trees—“as New Hebrion. And henceforth as is my right, I assume the titles of viceroy and governor of this, the westernmost of the possessions of the Hebriate crown.’ ”
“Sergeant, the salute.”
Mensurado’s parade-ground bellow put the jungle cacophony to shame.
“Present your pieces! Ready your pieces! Fire!”
A thunderous volley of shots went off as one. The clearing was filled with toiling grey smoke which hung like cotton in the airless space.
The forest had gone entirely silent.
The men stood looking up at the crowded vegetation, the huge absence of sound. Instinctively, everyone stepped closer together.
A crashing of undergrowth, and Ensign di Souza appeared, scarlet face and yellow hair above his cuirass, with a pair of sailors and Bardolin the mage labouring in his wake. The wizard’s imp rode on his shoulder, agog.
“Sir, we heard shooting,” he panted.
“We have seen off the enemy,” Murad drawled. He loosened the drawstrings on the Hebrian flag and it fell open, a limp gold and crimson rag.
“Report, Ensign,” he said sharply, waving powder-smoke from in front of his face.
“The second wave of boats are ashore, and the mariners are off-loading the water casks as we speak. Sequero asks your permission, sir, to get the surviving horses ashore and start hunting up fodder for them.”
“Permission denied,” Murad said crisply. “The horses are not a priority here. We must secure a campsite for the landing party first, and investigate the surrounding area. Who knows what may be lurking in this devil’s brush about us?”
Several of the soldiers glanced round uneasily, until Mensurado, with shouts and kicks, got them to reloading their arquebuses.
Murad considered the little clearing. The forest noises had started up again. Already they were becoming used to them, a background irritation, not a thing to fear.
“We’ll throw up a camp here,” he said. “It’s as good a place as any, and we’ll have fresh water. Captain Hawkwood, your men can refill their water casks here also.”
Hawkwood looked at the knee-deep stream, already muddied by the boots of the soldiers, and said nothing.
Bardolin joined him. The old wizard mopped his streaming face with his sleeve and gestured at the surrounding jungle.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before? Such trees!”
Hawkwood shook his head. “I’ve been to Macassar, the jungles inland from the Malacars, after ivory and hides and river-gold, but this is different. This has never been cleared; it is the original forest, a country where man has never made a mark. These trees might have stood here since the Creation.”
“Dreaming their strange dreams,” Bardolin said absently, caressing his imp with one hand. “There is power in this place, Hawkwood. Dweomer, and something else. Something to do with the very nature of the land, perhaps. It has not yet noticed us, I think, but it will, in its slow way.”
“We’ve always said the place might be inhabited.”
“I am not talking about inhabitants, I am talking about the land itself. Normannia has been scoured and gouged and raped for too long; we own it now. We are its blood. But here the land belongs only to itself.”
“I never took you for a mystic, Bardolin,” Hawkwood said with some irritation. His injured shoulder was paining him.
“Nor am I one.” The mage seemed to come awake. He smiled. “Maybe I’m just getting old.”
“Old! You’re more hale than I am.”
Two seamen appeared: Mihal and Masudi, one bearing a wooden box.
“Velasca wants to know if he can let the men have a run ashore, sir,” Masudi said, his black face gleaming.
“Not yet. This isn’t a blasted pleasure trip. Tell him to concentrate on getting the ship rewatered.”
“Aye, sir,” Masudi said. “Here’s the box you wanted from the cabin.”
“Put it down.”
Murad joined them. “I’m taking a party on a reconnaissance of the area. I want you two to come with us.
