Ships from the West (6 page)

The night passed, the stars wheeled uncaring and unseen beyond the shroud of fog that held the fleet captive.

Unforgivably, Hawkwood had nodded off. He jerked upright with a start, a sense of urgent knowledge burning in his mind. As his eyes focused he took in the steady glow of the lamp motionless in its gimbals, the blur of the chart on the table before him resolving itself into the familiar coastal line of Hebrion, the shining dividers lying where they had dropped from his limp fingers. He had been dozing for a few minutes, no more, but something had happened in that time. He could feel it.

And he looked up, to see he was not alone in the cabin.

A darkness there in the corner, beyond the reach of the light. It was crouched under the low ship timbers. For an instant he thought he saw two lights wink once, and then the darkness coalesced into the silhouette of a man. Above his head eight bells rang out, announcing the end of the middle watch. It was four hours after midnight, and dawn was racing towards him over the Hebros Mountains far to the east. It would arrive in the space of half a watch. But here on the Western Ocean, night reigned still.

‘Richard. It is good to see you again.’

Hawkwood tilted the lamp, and saw standing in the corner of the cabin the robed figure of Bardolin. He shot to his feet, letting the lamp swing free and career back and forth to create shadowed chaos out of the cabin. He lurched forward, and in a moment had grasped Bardolin’s powerful shoulders, bruising the flesh under the black robes. A wild grin split his face, and the mage answered it. They embraced, laughing - and the next instant Hawkwood drew back again as if a snake had lunged at him. The smile fled.

‘What are you come here for?’ His hand went to his hip, but he had unslung his baldric, and the cutlass hung on the back of his chair.

‘It’s been a long time, Captain,’ Bardolin said. As he advanced into the light, Hawkwood retreated. The mage held up a hand. ‘Please, Richard, grant me a moment - no calling out or foolishness. What has it been, fifteen years?’

‘Something like that’

‘I remember Griella and I searching the docks of old Abrusio for the
Osprey
that morning’ - a spasm of pain ran across his face - ‘and the brandy I shared with Billerand.’

‘What happened to you, Bardolin? What did they do to you?’

The mage smiled.

‘How the world has changed under our feet. I should never have gone into the west with you, Hawkwood. Better to have burned in Hebrion. But that’s all empty regret now. We cannot unmake the past, and we cannot wish ourselves other than we are.’

Hawkwood’s hammering heart slowed a little. His hand edged towards the hilt of the cutlass. ‘You’d best do it and have done then.’

‘I’m not here to kill you, you damned fool. I’m here to offer you life.’ Suddenly he was the old Bardolin again; the dreamy menace retreated. ‘I owe you that at least. Of them all, you were the only one who was a friend to me.’

‘And Golophin.’

‘Yes - him too. But that’s another matter entirely. Hawkwood, grab yourself a longboat or a rowboat or whatever passes for a small insignificant craft among you mariners, and get into it. Push off from this floating argosy and her consorts, and scull out into the empty ocean if you want to see the dawn.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘You’re all dead men, and your ships are already sunk. Believe me, for the love of God. You have to get clear of this fleet.’

‘Tell me, Bardolin.’

But the strange detachment had returned. It did not seem to Hawkwood that it was truly Bardolin who smiled now.

‘Tell you what? For the sake of old friendship I have done my best to warn you. You were always a stubborn fool, Captain. I wish you luck, or if that fails, a quick and painless end.’

He faded like the light of a candle when the sun brightens behind it, but Hawkwood saw the agony behind his eyes ere he disappeared. Then was alone in the cabin, and the sweat was running down his back in streams.

He heard the gunfire and the shrieking up on deck, and knew that whatever Bardolin had tried to warn him about had begun.

Four

Snow lay bright and indomitable on the peaks of the Cimbrics, and beyond their blinding majesty the sky was blue as a kingfisher’s back. But spring was in the air, even as high up as this, and the margins of the Sea of Tor were ringed with only a mash of undulating pancake ice which opened and closed silently around the bows and sterns of the fishing boats that plied its waters.

In Charibon the last yard-long icicles had fallen from the eaves of the cathedral and the lead of the roof was steaming in the sunlight. The monks could be heard singing Sext. When they were done they would troop out in sombre lines to the great refectories of the monastery-city for their midday meal, and when they had eaten they would repair to the scriptoriums or the library or the vegetable and herb gardens or the smithies to continue the work which they offered up to God along with their songs. These rituals had remained unchanged for centuries, and were the cornerstones of monastic life. But Charibon itself, seat of the Pontiff and tabernacle of western learning, had changed utterly since the Schism of eighteen years before.

It had always been home to a large military presence, for here were the barracks and training grounds of the Knights Militant, the Church’s secular arm. But now it seemed that the austere old city had exploded into an untidy welter of recent building, with vast swathes of the surrounding plain now covered with lines of wooden huts and turf-walled tents, and linking them a raw new set of gravel-bedded roads spider-webbing out in all directions. West to Almark they went, north to Finnmark, south to Perigraine, and east to the Torrin Gap, where the Cimbrics and the tall Thurians halted, leaving an empty space against the sky, a funnel through which invading armies had poured for millennia.

And on the parade grounds the armies mustered, bristling masses of armoured men. Some on horseback with tall lances and pennons crackling in the wind, others on foot with shouldered pikes, or arquebuses, and others manhandling the carriages of long-muzzled field guns, waving rammers and linstocks and sponges and leading trains of mules which drew rattling limbers and caissons. The song of the monks in their quiet cloisters was drowned out by the cadenced tramp of booted feet and the low thunder of ten thousand horses. The flags of a dozen kingdoms, duchies and principalities flapped over their ranks. Almark, Perigraine, Gardiac, Finn-mark, Fulk, Candelaria, Touron, Tarber. Charibon was now the abode of armies, and the seat of Empire.

The Fimbrian embassy had been billeted in the old Pontifical Palace which overlooked the Library of Saint Garaso and the Inceptine cloisters. Twelve men in trailworn sable, they had tramped at their fearsome pace across the Malvennor Mountains, over the Narian Hills and down on to the plains of Tor to consult with the Pontiff Himerius in Charibon. They had marched for miles amid the tented and log-hewn city which had sprung up around the monastery, noting with a professional eye the armouries and smithies and horse lines, the camp discipline of the huge host dwelling there, and the endless lines of supply wagons that came and went to the rich farmlands of the south and west, all under tribute now. Almark and Perigraine were no longer counted among the monarchies of the Five Kingdoms. Himerian presbyters ruled them, priestly autocrats answerable only to the High Pontiff himself, and King Cadamost had shaved his head and become an Inceptine novice.

It was twelve years since the Fimbrian Electors had signed the Pact of Neyr with the Second Empire, wherein they had professed complete neutrality in the doings of the continent outside their borders. They had sent an army east to aid Torunna against the Merduk, only to see half of it destroyed and the other half desert to the command of the new Torunnan king. This had brought to an abrupt halt their dreams of rekindling some form of imperial power in Normannia, and to add insult to injury they had in subsequent years seen a steady trickle of their best soldiers desert and take ship for the east, where they had joined the tercios of King Corfe and his renegade Fimbrian general, Formio. The Torunnan victories of sixteen years before had shaken the Electorates, who had long been accustomed to viewing all other western powers as inferior in military professionalism to themselves. But the heterogeneous army which Corfe had led to such savage victories against the Merduk had given them much food for thought. The Torunnans were now the most renowned soldiers in the world - at least as long as they were led by their present king. And they were now part of this Grand Alliance which encompassed Hebrion, Astarac, Gabrion, and even Ostrabar. Set against this confederation was the might of the Second Empire. At the court of the Electors it had long been decided that Fimbria would swallow her pride, bide her time and await the collision of these two titans. After the dust had cleared, then that would be the time for Fimbria to reassert her old claims on the continent, and not before - no matter how this neutrality might frustrate and even anger the common soldiers of the army, who were burning to reclaim their reputation as the conquerors of the west. But times were changing with a rapidity bewildering to those who had grown up with the twin certainties of the indivisible Holy Church and the menace of the heathen east, and Fimbria had decided to review her policies, and take stock of the new order of the world.

‘I make it at least thirty thousands of infantry, and ten of cavalry,’ Grail said, consulting the varicoloured counters which littered the table.

Justus turned from the window and his view of Charibon’s faithful streaming out of the cathedral into the square below. Almost all the clerics he saw were in black. One or two in Antillian brown here and there, but for the most part the Inceptines seemed to have virtually subsumed every other religious order in the world. In this half of the continent, at any rate.

‘There are other camps,’ he told his companion. ‘Further to the east, towards the gap. They have fortresses there in the foothills of the Thurians. Their entire strength may be half as much again.’

‘And that’s not counting their garrisons,’ a third raven-clad Fimbrian put in from his post by the fire. ‘Our intelligence indicates that they have large contingents in Vol Ephrir and Alstadt, and even as far west as Fulk.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ Grail said. They have the resources of half the continent to draw upon, and then there are these
others …’
With an impatient gesture, he began scooping the counters into a leather pouch, scowling.

‘It is mainly these others that we are here to find out about,’ Justus told him. ‘Armies of men, we can prepare for. But if half the rumours are true—’

Tf half the rumours are true then the Second Empire has both God and the devil on its side.’ Grail chuckled. ‘I daresay it is mostly a case of tall tales and skilful rumour-handling.’

The Fimbrian at the fire was shorter, and older than the other two. His hair was a cropped silver, and his face was as hard and seamed as wood. Only his eyes gave him away. They flashed now like two cerulean gemstones. ‘There is more to it than that. There are strange things happening in Char-ibon; there have been ever since this Aruan appeared out of nowhere five, six years go and waltzed into the Vicar-Generalship as though it had been specially set aside for him.’

‘Do you think the stories about him are true then, Brian-non?’ Grail asked. There was a mocking edge to his voice.

‘The world is full of strange things. This man has opened the doors of the Himerian Church to all the sorcerers and witches of the Five Kingdoms, reversing the ecclesiastical policies of generations, and they have come flocking to him as though he were Ramusio himself. Why would he do this? Where has he come from? And what manner of man is he? That is what we are here to find out. Now, before the stormclouds break and it is too late.’

A knock on the door of the chamber, and a man who might have been brother to any of those within peered inside and said, ‘It’s time, sir. They’re expecting us in a few moments.’

‘Very well,’ Briannon answered. He repaired to a side chamber for a few minutes, and when he returned some of the worst of the grime had been slapped off his uniform, and he wore a scarlet sash about his middle.

‘No circlet?’ Grail asked wryly. He and Justus had buckled on short swords of iron and wiped some of the mud off their boots, but aside from that they looked much as they had when they had marched into Charibon the night before.

‘No. As we agreed, I am Marshal Briannon here - no relation to the Elector who happens to share my name.’

The Pontifical Reception Hall had been built to overawe. It resembled the nave of a cathedral. Every supplicant who sought an audience with the High Pontiff must needs tramp a long, intimidating path down its length towards the high dais at the end, his every move flanked by alcoves in the massive walls - every one of which held the figure of a Knight Militant in full armour, standing like a graven statue, but following everything with his eyes.

At the far end, Himerius sat on a tall throne, and on either side of him stood his Vicar-General, and the Presbyter of the Knights. Other monks were black shadows in the background, murmuring and scraping quills across parchment. Although it was a bright spring day outside, and sunlight flooded in through the tall windows that butted the vaulted roof of the building, braziers were burning around the dais, and elaborately carved wooden screens had been drawn around, so it seemed that Himerius and his advisors were cloaked in shadow and flame light, and difficult to make out after the dazzling length of the hall.

The twelve Fimbrians marched sombrely towards this darkness. Their swords had been left in the antechamber and their hands were empty but they somehow seemed more formidable than the heavily armoured Knights whom they passed by.

They came to a cadenced halt before the dais, and were enveloped in the shadow that surrounded Himerius.

Grail was listening to the opening exchanges with one part of his mind, but more of it was studying the men he saw before him. Himerius was old - in his seventies now - and his frame seemed withered and lost in the rich robes which clad it. But his eyes were bright as a raptor’s, his ivory face still retaining a haggard vitality.