language. They felt like travellers in a foreign country as they pushed past ship after ship, wharf after wharf, and passed men of every land and faith and colour as they went. Since the easing of the edict in the wake of the Prelate of Abrusio’s departure for the Charibon Synod, foreign ships had been putting into Abrusio without let-up. It was as though they were trying to make up for the time they had lost—or would lose again once the Prelate returned and foreigners were once more hauled off their ships and into the catacombs by the hundred.
“There,” Bardolin said at last. “I think that’s them. See the bird figurehead? It’s a sea osprey from the Levangore. One knows from the speckles on its breast.”
They stood before a wide stone dock dotted with mooring bollards and littered with guano. Snug in the berth behind the dock were two ships, their bowsprits projecting out over Bardolin’s head and their masts tall, rope-tangled edifices towering up into the blue sky.
There were men everywhere it seemed, clinging to every piece of rigging and every rail. Some were out on the hulls on stages, painting the sea-battered wood with what looked like white lead. Others were knotting and splicing furiously in the shrouds. A gang of them were heaving on the windlass, and Bardolin saw that they were replacing a topmast. He knew little of ships, but he knew it was unusual, not to say revolutionary, to have masts in several pieces instead of one long, massive yard. This Hawkwood seemed to take his calling seriously.
Yet more men were on the dock, hauling on tackles attached to the mainyard, lifting net-wrapped bundles of casks and crates up over the ships’ sides and on to the decks. On the decks themselves the hatches were wide open and gaping to receive the dangling goods, and Bardolin was astonished to see sheep, goats and cages of chickens go up in the air along with the wine barrels and boxes of salt meat and ship’s biscuit. He noted with approval a huge sack of lemons being loaded also. It was thought by many that they combated the killer disease of scurvy, though many others believed the condition was caused by the unsanitary conditions aboard any ship.
“Who are we to talk to?” Griella asked wide-eyed. Her grip on the wizard’s hand had not relaxed one whit.
Bardolin pointed to a burly, ornately mustachioed figure on the larger of the two ships. He was standing at the back—the quarterdeck?—and shouting furiously at a group of men down in the waist of the ship. He had a long, eastern water-pipe in one hand and he shook it at the men as though it were a weapon. His hair was cut so short that the sunlight made his scalp gleam through the bristle.
“I would say he is in charge,” Bardolin decided.
“Is he this Hawkwood man?”
“I don’t know, child. We’ll have to ask.”
He and Griella made their tortuous way through the piled provisions and cordage and timber on the wharf to where a gangway with raised planks for steps had been thrown down from the waist of the larger ship. Some of the sailors stopped to stare at the hard-faced, soldierly looking man and the shining-haired girl on his arm. There was an appreciative whistle and ribald chatter in a language even Bardolin did not recognize; but the meaning and the gesture that accompanied it were obvious.
Griella spun round on the obscenely capering seamen. With the sunlight in her eyes it seemed they had a yellow glow, and the lips drew back from her white teeth in a snarl.
Bardolin tugged her on, leaving the sailors staring after the pair. One man hurriedly made the Sign of the Saint.
They laboured up the precarious gangplank, which seemed designed for the agility of apes rather than that of men. Once on deck, Bardolin raised a hand to the furious mustachioed man and shouted in his best sergeant of arquebusiers voice:
“Ho there, Captain! Might we have a word with you?”
The man yanked his water-pipe out of his mouth as though it had bitten him and glared at the pair.
“Who in the name of the Prophet’s Arse are
“Someone who is to take ship with you in a short while. May we speak to you?”
The man’s eyes rolled in his head. “A warlock I shouldn’t wonder, and his doxy with him too. Sweet Saints, what a trip this is promising to be!”
He turned away from the quarterdeck rail, muttering to himself. Bardolin and Griella looked at one another, and then clambered up towards him, feeling two dozen baleful stares on their backs as they went. It was like intruding on the territory of some alien, primitive tribe.
The quarterdeck was littered with coiled ropes and light spars of timber. Everywhere lines of the running rigging came down to be hitched about fiferails. A brass bell glittered, painfully bright in the sun, and the huge tiller that steered the ship from the half-deck below had been unshipped and lay to one side. The man was leaning on the taffrail and puffing on his gurgling pipe. His eyes were slits of suspicion.
“Well, what do you want? We’re outfitting for a blue-water voyage and we’re short of men. I have things to do, and passing the time of day with landsmen is not one of them.”
“I am Bardolin of Carreirida and this is my ward, Griella Tabard. We have been told we are to be passengers on one of the vessels of Ricardo Hawkwood, and we wanted to see them and ask for advice on preparing for the coming voyage.”
The man looked as though he were about to give a sneering answer, but something in Bardolin’s eye stopped him.
“You’ve been a soldier,” he said instead. “I can see the helm scar. You don’t look like a wizard.” He paused, staring into the glass-sided bubble of his pipe for a second, then grudgingly said: “I am Billerand, first mate of the
The imp squirmed in Bardolin’s bosom, making Billerand gape.
“Might we talk below?” Bardolin asked. “There are many sets of ears up here.”
“All right.”
The mate led them down a companionway in the deck and they blinked in the gloom, startling after the harsh brightness of the day. It was close down here; the heat seemed to hang like a tangible thing in their throats. They could smell the wood of the ship, the pitch that caulked the seams, soft and bitter-smelling, and the faint stink of the bilge, like filth and water left to lie stagnant in a warm place. They could hear, too, the thumps and shouts of men off in the ship’s hold. It sounded like a fight going on in the adjacent room of a large house, muffled but somehow very near.
They went through a door, stepping over a high storm sill, and found themselves in the Master’s cabin. One side of it was taken up by the long stern windows. They could look out and see the harbour sunlit and framed by the curving lines of the interior bulkheads, like a backlit painting of sharp brilliance. There were two small culverins on either side of the cabin, lashed up tight against their closed gunports. Billerand sat down behind the table that ran athwartships, the scene of the harbour behind him.
“Is that a familiar you have there?” he asked, pointing to the wriggling movement in the breast of Bardolin’s robe.
“Aye, an imp.”
The mate’s face seemed to lighten somewhat. “They’re lucky things to have on a ship, imps. They keep the rats down. The men will be pleased with that at least. Let him out, if you please.”
Bardolin let the imp crawl out of the neck of his robe. The tiny creature blinked its eyes, its ears moving and quivering on either side of its head. Bardolin could feel its fear and fascination.
Billerand’s fierce face relaxed into a smile. “Here, little one. See what I have for you?” He produced a small quid of tobacco from a neck pouch and held it out. The imp looked at Bardolin, and then leapt on to the table and sniffed at the tobacco. It took it delicately in one minute, clawed hand and then began to gnaw on it like a squirrel working at a nut. Billerand scratched it gently behind the ear and his smile widened into a grin.
“As I said, the hands will be pleased.” He leaned back again. “What would you have me tell you then, Bardolin of Carreirida?”
“What do you know of this voyage we are to undertake?”
“Very little. Only that it is to the west. The Brenn Isles, maybe. And we are not taking cargo, only passengers and some Hebrian soldiery. We’ll be packed in these two ships tighter than a couple on their honeymoon night.”
“And the nature of the other passengers, besides the soldiers?”
“Dweomer-folk, like yourself. The hands do not know it yet, and I’d as soon leave it that way for the
