huddled about a single soldier who was striving to create fire. They might have been men at the dawn of the world, crouched in the terrifying and unknowable dark, their eyes craving the light to see what was coming at them out of the night.
The flames caught at last. They saw themselves; a circle of faces around a tiny fire. The jungle towered off on all sides, the night creatures laughing and croaking at their fear. They were in an alien world, as lost and alone as forgotten children.
H AWKWOOD and Bardolin sat by one of the fires later in the night. There were thirty men ashore, lying around half a dozen camp-fires which spat and hissed in the surrounding mud. A dozen men stood guard with halberd and sword whilst a few others were methodically and cautiously turning a pile of gunpowder off to one side, trying to dry it out without blowing themselves to kingdom come. The arquebuses were useless for the moment.
“We don’t belong here,” Hawkwood said quietly, chucking Bardolin’s imp under the chin so that it gurgled and grinned at him, its eyes two little lamps in the firelight.
“Maybe the first Fimbrians to venture east of the Malvennors said the same thing,” Bardolin replied. “New countries, unexplored lands, are always strange at first.”
“No, Bardolin, it’s more than that and you know it. This country’s very nature is different. Inimical. Alien. Murad thought he could wade ashore and start building his own kingdom here, but it won’t be that way.”
“You wrong him there,” the mage said. “After what happened on the ship, I think he knew better than to expect it to be easy. He is feeling his way, but he is hidebound by the conventions of his class and his training. He is thinking like a soldier, a nobleman.”
“Are we commoners so much more flexible in our thinking, then?” Hawkwood asked, grinning weakly.
“Maybe. We do not have so much at stake.”
“I have a ship—I had two ships. My life is gambled on this throw also,” Hawkwood reminded him.
“And I have no other home; this continent is the only place in the world, perhaps, where I and my like can be free of prejudice, make a new beginning,” Bardolin retorted. “That, at least, was the theory.”
“And yet tonight you were too tired even to conjure up a glimmer of werelight. What kind of omen is that for your new beginning?”
The wizard was silent, listening to the jungle noises.
“What is out there, Bardolin?” Hawkwood persisted. “What manner of men or beasts have claimed this place before us?”
The old mage poked at the fire, then slapped his cheek suddenly, wincing. He peeled an engorged, many- legged thing from his face, eyed it with mild curiosity for a second and then threw it into the flames.
“As I said, there is Dweomer here, more than I have ever sensed in any other place,” he said. “The land we saw before us today is thick with it.”
“Was that truly a road? Are we to stumble across another civilization here?”
“I think so. I think something exists on this continent which we in the Ramusian west have never even guessed at. I keep thinking of Ortelius, our stowaway Inceptine and werewolf. He was charged with making sure your ships never made it this far, that much is clear. Perhaps he had a fellow on your other vessel, the one that was lost. In any case, his mission was entrusted to him by someone in this land, this strange country upon which we have made landfall. And there is Dweomer running through it all, the work of mages. Hawkwood, I do not think we will leave this continent alive, any of us.”
The mariner stared at him across the fire. “Rather soon to be making such predictions of doom, isn’t it?” he managed at last.
“Soothsaying is one of the Seven Disciplines, but it is not one of mine, along with weather- working and the Black Change. Yet I feel we have no future here. I know it, and for all Murad’s claims and posturings, I think he knows it too.”
I T was a clammy, muddy campsite that presented itself to the shore party with the dawn, but Murad began issuing orders immediately and the soldiers were harangued out of their torpor by Sergeant Mensurado. Nothing had happened during the night, though few of them had slept. Hawkwood for one had missed the lulling rock of his ship beneath him, the waves lapping at the hull. His
They staggered down to the brightness of the beach, the heat already being flung at their faces from its reflected glare. The carrack rode at anchor beyond the reef, an incredibly comforting sight for soldier and sailor alike.
Breakfast was ship’s biscuit and wood-hard salt pork, eaten cold on the beach. All manner of fruit was hanging within easy reach, but Murad had forbidden anyone to touch the stuff so they ate as if they were still at sea.
Throughout the morning the longboats plied the passage of the reef and brought across stores and equipment. The surviving horses were too weak to swim ashore behind the boats so they were trussed up and lowered into the larger of the vessels like carcasses. Released on dry land for the first time in months, they stood like emaciated caricatures of the fine animals they had once been and Sequero put half a dozen men to finding fodder for them.
The water casks were replenished by Hawkwood’s sailors and towed back out to the carrack in bobbing skeins. Another party led by Hawkwood himself rowed out to that part of the reef upon which the wreck of the
The surf was too rough for them to go close, but they could see a desiccated body wedged in the timbers of the beakhead, unrecognizable, the seabirds and the elements having done their work too well.
Further up the coast there was more wreckage, fragments mostly. The caravel had been shattered by its impact on the reef as if by an explosion. Hawkwood’s crew found the shredded remnants of another corpse a mile to the north and some threads of clothing, but nothing more. The caravel’s crew and passengers had perished to a man, it seemed.
The passengers aboard the carrack were rowed ashore at last, over eighty of them. They stood on the beach of this new land like folk cast adrift. Which in a way was what they were.
Back in Hebrion it was winter, and the old year was almost over. There would be snow thick upon the Hebros, the winter storms thrashing the swells of the Fimbrian Gulf and the Hebrian Sea. Here the heat was relentless and choking, a miasma of humid jungle stink hanging in their throats like a fog. It sapped their strength, weighed them down like chainmail. And yet the work did not cease, the orders continued to be issued, the activity went on without let-up.
They moved in off the beach a quarter of a mile, perhaps, abandoning the campsite of the night before. Murad set soldiers, civilians and sailors alike to clearing a space between the trunks of the huge trees. Many of the younger trees were felled, and the would-be colonists burned off what vegetation they could, slashing and uprooting that which was too wet to catch fire. They erected shelters of wood and canvas and thatched leaves, and built a palisade as high as a man’s head, loopholed for firearms and with crude wooden watch-towers at each corner.
Almost every afternoon the work was halted by the titanic, thunderous rainstorms which came and went like the rage of a petulant god. Some of the colonists fell sick almost at once—the older ones, mostly, and one squalling toddler. Two died raving in fever, the rigours of the voyage and this new land too much for them. Thus the fledgling colony acquired a cemetery within its first week.
T HEY named the settlement Fort Abeleius after their young king. One hundred and fifty-seven souls lived within its perimeter, for Murad would allow none of the colonists to forge off on their own in search of suitable plots of land. For the moment, Hebrion’s newest colony was nothing more than an armed camp, ready to repel attack at short notice. No one knew who the attackers might be, or even what they might be, but there were no complaints. The story of the warped bird had spread quickly, and no one was keen to venture into the jungle alone.
Titles were distributed like sweetmeats. Sequero became a
Hawkwood became head of the Merchants’ Guild, which as yet did not exist, but true to his word Murad had procured monopolies for him and he had them in writing, heavy with seals and ribbons, the signature at the bottom none other than that of Abeleyn himself. They were beginning to grow mould with the damp heat, and he
