Ships from the West (33 page)

‘Rouse out his majesty the Sultan and bid him come here -humbly, mind. And then relay to Colonel Gribben my compliments, and he is to stand to the entire garrison at once, and then join me here also.’

As the men left him alone again, Formio snapped open the dispatch cases and read their uncurled contents, frowning.

Rone, 20th Forialon

The Himerians have struck here in the south. We knew they might, but they have arrived in much greater strength than we had expected and have incorporated the host of Candelan into their ranks. My command was worsted in a battle five miles east of the Candelan river and we have fallen back on Rone, where Admiral Berza’s ships are based. Most of his vessels are in dock, being refitted, and he has agreed to turn over his marines to my

command. I shall hold as long as I can, but I need reinforcements. The Perigrainians alone muster some twenty-five thousands. The enemy are infantry in the main, but they have also some of these accursed Hounds in their ranks, and the fear of them is out of all proportion to their numbers.

I believe that this is no mere raid, but a full-scale invasion. The enemy intends to overrun the entire kingdom from the south -while our forces are engaged far to the north. I need men, quickly.

Yours in haste,

Steynar Melf,

Officer Commanding Army South

Formio’s lips moved in silent oaths as he read the dispatch. There came attached a muster and casualty list and a rough map of operations. Melf was a professional if nothing else, but he was no military phoenix. And even with Berza’s marines he had less than five thousand men left to withstand this huge Himerian army.

Formio looked up as the Merduk Sultan strode down the hall flanked by two bodyguards. With him came Colonel Gribben, second in command of the garrison of Torunn, and a pair of aides. All of them had that bleared, dull look of men who have been roused out of sleep.

‘My lord Regent,’ Nasir said, ‘I hope that this is—’

‘How soon can you put your men back on the road, Sultan?’ Formio asked harshly.

Nasir’s mouth snapped shut. His eyes opened wide. ‘What has happened?’

‘How soon?’

The young man blinked. ‘Not today. We have just made a long march. The horses need more rest. Tomorrow morning, I suppose.’ Nasir rubbed his unlined forehead, his eyes darting to left and right under his hand.

‘Good. Gribben, I want you to pick out ten thousand of the best men of the garrison. They must be fit also, capable of a long forced march.’

‘Sir!’ Gribben saluted, though his face was a picture of alarm and perplexity.

“This combined force will move out at dawn tomorrow, and it will travel light. No mules or wagons. The men will carry their rations on their backs. No artillery either.’

‘Where are we going?’ the Sultan asked, sounding for a moment very like the boy he had so lately been.

‘South. The Himerians have invaded there and defeated our forces. They have stolen a march on us, it seems.’

‘Who will command, sir?’ Gribben asked.

Formio hesitated. He looked at Nasir and gauged his words carefully.

‘Majesty, you have not yet commanded an army in war, and this is not the time to learn. I - I beg you to let a more experienced man lead this combined army.’ And here Formio nodded at Gribben, who had fought in all the Torunnan army’s battles since Berrona, seventeen years before, and had been lately promoted by Corfe himself.

Nasir flushed. ‘That is out of the question. I cannot turn over the cream of Ostrabar’s armies for you to do with as you will, not while I am here with them. I shall command them, no other.’

Formio watched the young man steadily. ‘Sultan, this is not a game, or a manoeuvre on the practice fields. The army that goes south cannot afford to lose. I do not doubt your valour—’

‘I will not stand aside for a mere colonel. I could not do so, and still look my men in the face. But do not mistake me, my lord Regent. I am not some foolish boy dreaming of glory. If anyone takes overall command, it must be you, the Regent of Torunna, the great Formio himself. You, they will obey.’ Nasir smiled. ‘As will I, sultan or no.’

Formio was taken aback, but made his decision at once. ‘Very well, I shall command. Gribben, you will remain here in the capital. Majesty, I salute your forbearance. We have much to do, gentlemen, and only one day to do it in. By this time tomorrow we must be on the road south.’

In the night the wind dropped and the sky was entirely free of cloud. The little group of castaways huddled around their campfire in a dark, silent ring, but one of them, a broad-shouldered young man with sea-grey eyes, stood apart on a small rise some distance away and peered towards the horizon with the waning moon carving shadows out of his face.

‘Another city burns,’ Bleyn said wearily. ‘Which one might that be?’

Hawkwood stared south and west with his good eye, shivering. ‘That would be Rone, the southernmost city of Torunna. As well we never reached it.’

‘The world is gone mad,’ Jemilla said. ‘AH the old seers were right. We are at the end of days.’

Hawkwood cocked his head towards her. Bleyn’s mother was sitting upon a folded blanket hugging her knees to her breasts and her hair hung about her face in a rat-tailed hood. She had lost weight during the voyage, for seasickness had prostrated her the greater part of it, and there were lines running from the corners of her mouth and nose that had not been so noticeable before. Age had claimed Jemilla at last, and she no longer held any allure for Richard Hawkwood.

She seemed to know this, and was almost diffident in his company. She had gathered wildflowers to set atop Isolla’s cairn, something the old Jemilla would have scorned, and when she spoke her voice held none of its former ringing bite. But Hawkwood sensed something about her, some secret knowledge which was gnawing at her soul. When he had been supported by Bleyn in their limping stumble inland, he had found her watching the pair of them with an odd expression on her face. It held almost a note of regret.

He dropped his head again and continued to work on the rude crutch he was fashioning from a broken oar, then paused. His dirk still had some of Murad’s blood on it. He wiped the cold-running perspiration from his face.

Jemilla was right, perhaps. The world had indeed run mad, or else those unseen powers which fashioned its courses were possessed of a bitter humour. Well, this particular race was almost run.

For a moment the light of the fire was a broken dazzle in Hawkwood’s remaining eye. He had been loved by a queen, only to lose her almost as soon as he found her. And Murad was dead at last. Oddly, he could take no joy in the nobleman’s end. There had been something in his dying eyes which inspired not triumph but pity. A baffled surprise, maybe. Hawkwood had seen that look in the faces of many dying men. No doubt he would one day wear it himself.

‘I know nothing of this part of the world,’ Bleyn said. ‘Whither shall we go now?’

‘North,’ Hawkwood told him, fighting himself upright and trying out the crutch for size. His breath came in raw, ragged gasps. ‘We are in the country of friends, for now at any rate. We must stay ahead of the Himerians and get to Torunn.’

‘And what then?’

Hawkwood hobbled unsteadily over to him. ‘Then it’ll be time to get drunk.’ He clapped the boy on the shoulder, unbalancing himself, and Bleyn helped him keep his feet.

‘We’ll need horses and a cart. You won’t get far on that.’

Jemilla watched them as they stood together beyond the firelight, so alike, and yet so unalike. Father and son. She wiped her eyes angrily, covertly. That knowledge would remain sealed in her heart until the day she died.

‘Bleyn is now the rightful king of Hebrion,’ she said aloud, and the sailors about the fire looked at her. ‘He is the last of the Hibrusid Royal house, whether born on the wrong side of the blanket or no. You all owe him your allegiance, and must aid him in any way you can.’

‘Mother—’ Bleyn began.

‘Do not forget that, any of you. When we get to Torunn his heritage will be made public. The wizard Golophin already knows of it. That is why we were told to take ship with you.’

‘So the rumours were true,’ Arhuz said. ‘He is Abeleyn’s son.’

‘The rumours were true. He is all that is left of the Hebrian nobility.’

Hawkwood nudged Bleyn, who stood wordless and uncertain.
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beg leave for leaning on the Royal shoulder, majesty.

Do you think you could stir the Royal legs and go hunt us up some more firewood?’ And both Bleyn and the mariners about the fire laughed, though Jemilla’s thin face darkened. The boy left Hawkwood and went out into the moonlit darkness on his errand, while the mariner stumped back to the fire.

‘Jemilla’ he said sharply, and she glared at him, ready for argument. But Hawkwood only smiled gently at her, his eyes fever-bright.

‘He’ll make a good king.’

The next morning the early sunlight rose over the world to reveal bars of smoke rising up from the south-western horizon. The nearest was scarcely ten miles away. The castaways climbed out of their blankets, shivering, and stamped their feet, staring at the besmirched sky. There was little talk, and less to eat, and so they started off at once, hoping to come across some friendly village or farm that would speed them on their journey.

Villages and farms they found in plenty, but they were all deserted. The inhabitants of the surrounding countryside had seen the smoke on the air also, and had decided not to await its coming. Bleyn and Arhuz ranged far ahead of the rest of them and procured food in plenty, and extra blankets for the chill nights, but all manner of steed and vehicle had left with their fleeing owners, and so they must needs limp along on foot, their faces always set towards the north, and Hawkwood the slowest of them all, the dressing on his eye weeping a thin continual stream of yellow fluid.

Four days they proceeded in this manner, sleeping in empty farmhouses at night and starting their daily marches before dawn. On the fifth day, however, they finally caught up with the streams of other refugees heading north and joined a straggling column of the dispossessed that choked the road for as far as the eye could see. The crutch-wielding Hawkwood was found space on the back of a laden wagon, and Jemilla joined him, for the mariner’s fever had risen inexorably over the past few days, and she kept him well wrapped and wiped the sweat and the pus from his burning face.

The days were becoming warmer as late spring edged into an early summer, and the crowds of people which choked the roads sent up a lofty cloud of dust that hung in the air to match the palls of smoke that pursued them. Talking to the fleeing Torunnans, Bleyn learned that Rone had fallen after a bitter assault, and its defenders had been massacred to a man. The ships docked in the harbour had been burned and the land about laid waste. The Torunnan commander, Melf, and Admiral Berza of the fleet were both dead, but their stand had bought time for the general population to get away from the jubilant Perigrainians and Candelarians who were on the roads behind. But ordered companies of disciplined men will always make better time than mobs of panicked civilians, and the enemy were gaining. What would happen when the Himerian forces caught up with the refugees no one would speculate upon, though many of them had lived through the Merduk Wars and had seen it all before. Where is the King? they asked. Where is the army? Can they all be up in Gaderion, or have they given any thought to the south at all? And they trudged along the dusty roads in their tens of thousands, holding their children in their arms, and hauling hand carts piled high with their possessions, or urging along slow-moving ox wagons with a frantic cracking of whips.

‘Help me get him off the wagon,’ Jemilla told her son, and together the two of them lifted the delirious Hawkwood from the bed of the overburdened vehicle as it trundled forward relentlessly in the heat and the dust. The mariner jerked and kicked in their arms and mumbled incoherently. The heat of his body could be felt even through the sodden blanket in which he was wrapped.

The other sailors had long deserted them, even Arhuz, becoming lost in the trudging crowds and teeming roadsides. So it was with some difficulty that Jemilla and Bleyn carried their mumbling burden off the road and through the ranks of refugees, until they were clear of the exodus and could lay the mariner down on a grassy bank not far from the eaves of a green-tipped beech wood. Jemilla laid her palm on his hot brow and thought she could almost feel the poison boiling within his skull.

‘His wound has gone bad,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what we can do.’ She took the mariner’s hand and his brown fingers clenched about her slender pale ones, crushing the blood out of them. But she said no word.

Bleyn knuckled his eyes, looking very young and lost. ‘Will he die, Mother?’

‘Yes. Yes, he will. We will stay with him.’ And then Jemilla shocked her son by bowing her head and weeping silently, the tears coursing down her pale, proud face. He had never in his short life seen his mother cry. And she clung to this man as though he were dear to her, though during the voyage she had treated him haughtily, as a noblewoman would any commoner.

‘Who was he?’ he asked her, amazed.

She dried her eyes quickly. ‘He was the greatest mariner of the age. He made a voyage which has passed already into legend, though small reward he received for it, for he was of low blood. He was a good man, and I - I loved him once. I think perhaps he loved me, back in the years when the world was a sane place.’ The tears came again, though her face remained unchanged. More than anything she wanted to tell Bleyn who this man really was, but she could not. He must never know, not if he were to make his claim to Hebrion with any conviction.

Even to herself, Jemilla’s reasoning seemed hollow. The Five Kingdoms were gone, their last hope, Torunna, falling to pieces in front of her eyes. There would soon be no room in the world for herself and her son and the old order of things. But she had come too far to relinquish hope now. She remained silent.