Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (38 page)

He swore viciously and fluently under his breath, and then straightened. How was the
Grace of God
faring? Had Haukal been caught as unprepared as he? The caravel was a sound, weatherly little vessel, but he knew for a fact that it had never before encountered seas as high as these.

He waved to the helmsmen and left the tiller-house, lurching with the dip and rise of the ship. He slid down a ladder and then kept going forward until he was through into the gundeck. There he halted, looking up the long length of the ship.

The place was a shambles. The sailors had lashed the guns tight so they were crouched up against the gunports like great, chained beasts, and in between them a mass of humanity cowered and writhed in a foot of water that came surging up and down the deck with every dip of the carrack's bow. Hawkwood saw bodies floating face-down in the water, the pathetic rag-tag possessions of the passengers drifting and abandoned. There was a collective wailing of women while men cursed. The lanterns had been put out, which was just as well. The deck resembled the dark, fevered nightmare of a visionary hermit, a picture of some subterranean hell.

Someone staggered over to him and took his arm.

"Well, Captain, are we sinking yet?"

There was no panic in the voice, perhaps even a kind of irony. In the almost dark Hawkwood thought he could make out a roughly broken nose, short-cropped hair, the square carriage of a soldier.

"Are you Bardolin, the girl Griella's guardian?"

"Aye."

"Well, we've no fear of sinking, though it was touch and go for a moment or two there. This storm may last some time so you had best get the passengers to make themselves as comfortable as they can."

The man Bardolin glanced back down the heaving length of the gundeck.

"How many hours do you think it will last?"

"Hours? More than that, it'll be. We're in for a blow of some days, if I'm any judge. I'll try and get the ship's cook to serve out some food as soon as we have things more settled. It'll be cold, mind. There will be no galley fires lit whilst the storm lasts."

He could see the dismay, instantly mastered, on the older man's face.

"Do you need any help?" Bardolin asked.

Hawkwood smiled. "No, this is a job for mariners alone. You see to your own people. Calm them down and make them more comfortable. As I say, this storm will last a while."

"Have you seen Griella? Is she all right?" Bardolin demanded.

"She'll be with Lord Murad, I expect."

As soon as he had said the words Hawkwood wished he had not. Bardolin's face had become like stone, his eyes two shards of winking glass.

"Thank you, Captain. I'll see what I can do here."

"One more thing." Hawkwood laid a hand on Bardolin's arm as he turned away. "The weather-worker, Pernicus. We may need him in the days to come. How is he?"

"Prostrate with fear and seasickness, but otherwise he is hale."

"Good. Look after him for me."

"Our ship's chaplain will not be happy at the thought of a Dweomer-propelled vessel."

"You let me worry about the Raven," Hawkwood growled and, slapping Bardolin on the arm, he left the gundeck with real relief.

Deeper he went, into the bowels of the ship. The
Osprey
was a roomy vessel, despite her lower than usual sterncastle. Below the gundeck was the main hold, and below that again the bilge. The hold itself was divided up into large compartments. One for the cable tiers, where the anchor cables were coiled down, one for the water and provisions, a small cubbyhole that was the powder store and then the newly created compartment that housed the damned horses and other livestock.

There was water everywhere, dripping from the deckhead above, sloshing around his feet, trickling down the sides of the hull. Hawkwood found himself a ship's lantern and fought it alight after a few aggravating minutes of fumbling in the dark with damp tinder. Then he made his way deeper below.

Here it was possible to hear more clearly the sound of the hull itself. The wood of the carrack's timbers was creaking and groaning with every pitch of her beakhead, and the sound of the wind was muted. The horses had gone silent, which was a blessing of sorts. Hawkwood wondered if any of them had survived.

He found a working party of mariners sent down by Velasca to secure the cargo. There was four feet of water in the hold, and the men were labouring waist-deep among the jumbled casks and sacks and boxes, lashing down anything that had come loose in the carrack's wild battle with the monster waves.

"How much water is she making?" Hawkwood asked their leader, a master's mate named Mihal, Gabrionese like himself.

"Maybe a foot with every two turns of the glass, sir. Most of it came down from above with those green seas we shipped, but her timbers are strained, too, and there's some coming in at the seams."

"Show me."

Mihal took him to the side of the hull, and there Hawkwood could see the timbers of the ship's side quivering and twisting. Every time the carrack moved with the waves, the timbers opened a little and more water forced itself in.

"We're not holed anywhere?"

"Not so far as I can see, sir. I've had men in the cable tiers and in the stockpens aft - a bloody mess down there, by the by. No, she's just taking the strain, is all, but I hope Velasca has strong men on the pumps."

"Report to him when you've finished here, Mihal. The pump crews and the helmsmen will need relieving soon."

"Aye, sir."

Hawkwood moved on, wading through the cold water. He struggled aft against the movement of the ship and passed through the bulkhead hatch that separated the hold from the stockpens nearer the stern.

Lanterns here, the terrified bleating of a few sheep, straw and dung turning the water into a kind of soup. Animal corpses were bobbing and drifting. Hawkwood approached the group of men who were working there in leather gambesons - soldiers, then, not members of his crew.

"Who's that?" a voice snapped.

"The Captain. Is that you, Sequero?"

"Hawkwood. Yes, it's me."

Hawkwood saw the pale ovals of faces in the lantern light, the shining flanks of a horse.

"How bad is it?"

Sequero splashed towards him. "What kind of ship's master are you, Hawkwood? No one was told to secure the horses, and then the ship went on its damned side. They never had a chance. Why could you not have warned my people?"

Sequero was standing before him, filthy and dripping. Something had laid open his forehead so that a flap of skin glistened there, but the blood had slowed to an ooze. The ensign's eyes were bright with fury.

"We had no time," Hawkwood said hotly. "As it was we almost lost the ship, and I've lost some of my men putting her to rights. We had no time to worry about your damned horses."

He thought for a second that Sequero was going to fly at him and tensed into a crouch, but then the ensign sagged, obviously worn out.

"I am no sailor. I cannot say whether you are in the right of it or not. Will the ship survive?"

"Probably. How many did you lose?"

"One of the stallions and another mare. They broke their legs when the ship went to one side."

"What about the other livestock?"

Sequero shrugged. It was not his concern.

"Well, get what stock have survived and secure them in their stalls. Lash them to the pens if you have to. This could be a long blow." Hawkwood was beginning to feel like a parrot, repeating his litany to everyone he met.

Sequero nodded dully.

"What about the soldiers? How are they faring?"

"Drunk, most of them. Some of the older ones have been saving their wine rations. They thought they were going to die, and so decided to drown whilst drunk."

Hawkwood laughed. "I've heard of worse ideas. What of Lord Murad?"

"What of him? He's closeted with his peasant whore as usual."

A violent lurch of the ship pitched them both into the stinking water. They struggled out of it spitting and cursing.

"Are you sure this thing won't sink, Captain?" Sequero sneered.

But Hawkwood was already retracing his steps forward. Time to get back on deck and take up his proper place. He was blind down here.

I
T HAD BECOME
a little lighter and the clouds seemed to have lifted above the level of the mastheads. The seas were just as mountainous though, great hills of water with troughs a quarter of a mile apart and crests as high as the carrack's topmasts. They were running before the wind now, and the waves were rising around the ship's stern, lifting her high into the air and then passing under her, leaving her almost becalmed in their lee. There seemed to be little danger of her being pooped, thanks to her construction, but they would have to ride the storm out, letting it blow them where it willed.

Velasca had had hawsers sent up to the mastheads and there were men working in the tops, struggling to secure them. Others were double lashing the upper-deck guns and the two ship's boats that had survived, though the passage of the runaway gun had smashed chunks out of both their sides. And to both larboard and starboard thick jets of white water were spewing out of the pumps as men bent up and down over them, trying to lighten the ship.

"Tiller there!" Hawkwood shouted down the hatch. "How's she steering?"

"Easier, sir," Masudi called back. "But the men are tiring."

"Mihal and his mess will be up to relieve you soon. Steady as she goes, Masudi."

"Aye, sir."

For hour after hour the carrack rode the vast waves and careered before the wind roughly south-west, away off their course and into seas unknown even to Tyrenius Cobrian. Despite the fact that the yards were bare, her speed was very great as she was shunted forward on the shining backs of the enormous breakers.

The watch changed. Exhausted seamen were relieved by others scarcely less exhausted, but the hands remained on deck for hour after hour, pumping, splicing, repairing or simply remaining in readiness for the next crisis.

It grew colder. When Hawkwood estimated that their storm-driven run had taken them some forty leagues off course the balminess in the air vanished and the water took on a grey, chill aspect in the sunless dawn of the next day. All that day they continued to run before the wind, eating bread and raw salt pork when they could, feeling the salt in their clothing rasp their saturated skin and continuing the unending repairs.

After a second night and a second day they began to feel that they had never been warm or dry, and had never really known sleep before. They lost another man off one of the yards who had slackened his grip out of sheer weariness, and they threw overboard the bodies of three passengers who had died of the injuries sustained in the first, savage squall. And they continued south-west across the titanic, illimitable Western Ocean, like a stick of wood adrift in a millrace with a knot of frenzied ants clinging to it. There was nothing else to do.

Eighteen

T
HEY CAME WITH
the dawn, as Martellus had said they would. Had it not been for the vigilance of the pickets they might have swarmed up to the very walls, so sudden was their onset; for the Merduks had elected to forgo a preliminary bombardment, preferring to gamble on achieving surprise. But the watching sentries set light to the signal rockets and flares, and suddenly the eastern barbican and the river were lit up with smoking red lights that described bright parabolas across the lightening sky and illuminated the bristling phalanxes of advancing troops below.

The garrison of the barbican rushed out to their stations. All along the walls, slow-match was lit and set to one side, men shouldered their arquebuses and powder and shot-carriers hurried up to the parapets with their vital loads.

The Merduk host, discovered, came on with a mighty roar, a rush of shouting and thumping feet that set the hair crawling on Corfe's head. Once again, he beheld the teeming mass of a Merduk army assaulting walls, like a seaweed-thick tide lapping at a cliff face.

The sun was coming up. More powder rockets were launched, this time to help the gunners aim their culverins. The swarming mob of Merduks was perhaps two hundred yards from the walls when Andruw stabbed the slow-match into the touch-hole of the first cannon.

It jumped back with a roar and an exploding fog of smoke. At the signal, the other big guns of the fortress began to bark out also until the entire barbican was a massive reeking smoke cloud stabbed through and through with red and yellow flame.

Corfe was able to see the result of the first few salvoes before the smoke hid the advancing hordes. The Torunnans were using delayed-fuse shells that exploded in midair and scattered jagged metal in a deadly radius beneath them. He saw swathes of the enemy fall or be tossed into the air and ripped to pieces, like crops flattened by an invisible wind. Then they came on again, dressing their broken lines and screaming their hoarse battlecries. There were hundreds of ladders in their midst, carried shoulder-high.

"What of their numbers, Corfe?" Andruw shouted. "What do you make them?"