The Second Empire

“I do not know. I only know that we were, and that we must not shirk the task God has assigned us. To do so would be the worst blasphemy we could commit. A man who spends his life in the service of a lie, knowing it to be a lie, is offencive to the eyes of God.”

Mehr Jirah paused in the doorway, and then nodded as Heria interpreted Albrec’s words. A moment later he was gone.

“Will he do anything?” Albrec asked her.

“Yes, though I don’t know what. He is a man of genuine piety, Merduk or no. He is the only one out of all of them who does not despise me. I’m not sure why.”

Perhaps he knows quality when he sees it, Albrec found himself thinking. And out of his throat the words came tumbling as though without conscious volition.

“Your husband in Aekir. Was his first name Corfe?”

Heria went very still. “How do you know that?”

A rattle of metal up the corridor beyond Albrec’s cell. Men talking, the sound of boots on stone. But Heria did not move.

“How do you know that?” she repeated.

“I have met him. He is still alive. Heria”—the words rushed out of him as someone outside shouted harshly in Merduk—“he is alive. He commands the armies of Torunna. He is the man who leads the red horsemen.”

The knowledge had almost a physical heft as it left him and entered her. He believed for an instant that she would fall to the floor. She flinched as if he had struck her and sagged against the door.

The turnkey appeared on the threshold. He looked terrified, and plucked at Heria’s sleeve whilst jabbering in Merduk. She shook him off.

“Are you sure?” she asked Albrec.

He did not want to say it for some reason, but he told the truth. “Yes.”

A soldier appeared at the door, a Merduk officer. He pulled Heria away looking both exasperated and frightened. The door was slammed shut, the keys clicking the lock into place again. Albrec slumped down on the bed and covered his face with his hands. Blessed Saint, he thought, what have I done?

TEN

I T was spring when they first sighted the Hebros Mountains on the horizon, and Hawkwood bent his head at the tiller and let the tears come silently for a while. Around him others of the crew were more vocal, loudly thanking God for their deliverance, or sobbing like children. Even Murad was not unmoved. He actually shook Hawkwood’s hand. “You are a master-mariner indeed, Captain, to make such a landfall.”

Hebrion loomed up steadily out of the dawn haze, the mountains tinted pink as the sun took them. They had weathered North Cape five days ago, beat before a passing storm in the Gulf of Hebrion, and were now sailing up Abrusio’s huge trefoil-shaped bay with a perfect south-west breeze on the larboard quarter. They had been away almost eight months, and the brave Osprey was sinking under them at last, every able-bodied man taking a shift at the pumps. But the water was almost over the orlop and Bardolin had had to be rechained in the master’s cabin or he would have drowned in the bilge.

Fair winds almost all the way, and apart from the one squall which had almost sunk them they had had a swift passage, and the accuracy of their landfall was indeed nothing short of miraculous. Hawkwood was burnt dark as mahogany by the sun, and he stood at the tiller in rags, his beard and unkempt hair frosted by salt and sea wind, his eyes two blue flashes startling in so swarthy a face. With the aid of his cross-staff, the accumulated lore of a lifetime at sea and a string of good luck, he had brought the Osprey home at last after one of the longest voyages of recorded history. And surely one of the most disastrous.

The seventeen survivors of the expedition at liberty stood on deck and stared as the carrack wheeled smoothly round to north-north-east and the familiar shoreline slid past on the larboard side. There was still snow on the Hebros, but only a light dusting of it, and the sun was warm on their naked backs—not the punishing hothouse heat of the west, but a refreshing spring warmth. They could see Abrusio’s heights rising up out of the haze ahead, and one of the soldiers cried out, pointing at the little flotilla of fishing yawls off the port beam as though they were some marvell.

Abrusio. They saw now the ruined expanses of the Lower City, the devastation of the docks, and the frantic rebuilding work that was going on there, thousands of men at work on miles of scaffolding. Hawkwood and Murad looked at one another. They had missed a war or some great natural disaster in their time away, it seemed. What other surprises were waiting for them in the old port-city?

“Back topsails!” Hawkwood cried as the Osprey slid through the sparsely populated wharves, all of which seemed damaged in some way or other. The Inner Roads were almost deserted of vessels, though the Hebrian naval yards were crammed full of warships, most of which were under repair.

“Stand ready with the bow-line there!”

The carrack slowed as the sails were backed and spilled their wind. Half a dozen men stood at the beakhead, ready to leap ashore with the heavy mooring ropes and make them fast to the bollards there. A small crowd had gathered on the quayside. Men were shading their eyes and pointing at the battered ship, some arguing with each other and shaking their heads. Hawkwood smiled. There was a slight jar as the Osprey came up against the rope buffers at the lip of the wharves.

“Tie her off lads. We’re home.”

Men leapt overboard and made the ship fast. Then they embraced each other, laughing, weeping, jumping up and down like a crowd of bronzed ragamuffins gone mad.

“Your Excellency,” Hawkwood said with heavy irony, “I have brought you home.”

The nobleman stared at him, and smiled. “Excellency no more. My title expired with the colony, as did yours, master Hawkwood. You will die a commoner after all.”

Hawkwood spat over the carrack’s side. “I can live with that. Now get your aristocratic backside off my ship.”

Nothing in Murad’s eyes. No shared comradeship, no sense of achievement, nothing. He turned away without another word and walked off the ship. The Osprey was so low in the water that one no longer had much of a climb down from the ship’s rail to the wharf. Murad continued walking, a grotesque, tatterdemalion figure which drew a battery of stares from the crowd that was gathering. None of them dared accost him, though, despite their consuming curiosity. The last Hawkwood saw of him he was negotiating the burnt expanse of what had been the Lower City, his face set towards the heights whereon Hebrion’s Royal palace loomed up out of the dawn haze.

Done with him at last, Hawkwood thought, and thanked God for it—for a whole host of things.

“Is that the Gabrian Osprey? Is that really her?” someone shouted out from the buzzing throng on the wharf.

“Aye, it’s her. Come home from the edge of the world.”

“Ricardo! Ricardo Hawkwood! Glory be to God!”

A short, dark man in rich but soiled garments of blue and yellow pushed through the crowd. He wore the chain of a port captain. “Richard! Ha, ha, ha! I don’t believe it. Back from a watery grave.”

Hawkwood climbed over the ship’s rail, and staggered as the unmoving stone of the wharf met his feet. It seemed to be gently rising and falling under him.

“Galliardo,” he said with a smile, and the short man clasped his hand and shook it as though he meant to wring it off. There were tears in his eyes.

“I had a mass said for you these six months past. Oh God, Richard, what has happened to you?”

The press of bodies about Hawkwood was almost unbearable. Half the dock workers in the area seemed to have gathered about the Osprey to look and wonder and hear her storey. Hawkwood blinked away his joy at landfall and tried to make himself think.

“Did you find it, Richard?” Galliardo was babbling. “Is there indeed a continent out in the west?”

“Yes, yes there is, and it can rot there as far as I’m concerned. Listen, Galliardo, she’s about to sink at her moorings. Every seam in her has sprung. I need men to man her pumps and caulkers to stop her holes, and I need them now.”