Ships from the West (7 page)

To his right stood a tall man in Inceptine black, with the chain of the Vicariate around his neck. He was monk-bald, but had the air about him of a great nobleman. He had a hawk nose that put even Himerius’s to shame, and thick, sprawling eyebrows over deep orbits within which the eyes were mere glints. He looked somehow foreign, as though he came from the east. It was the high cruelty of the cheekbones, perhaps. There was about him an air of command that impressed even Grail.

This was Aruan of Garmidalan, the Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order, and, some said, the true head of the Hime-rian Church. The power behind the throne at any rate, and an object of mystery and speculation throughout all the Norman-nic kingdoms.

To Himerius’s left stood a different pot of fish entirely. A broad-shouldered, shaven-headed soldier in half armour with a broken nose and the scar of long helm-wearing on his forehead. In his sixties, perhaps, he looked as hale and formidable as any Fimbrian drill sergeant Grail had ever known. But there was intelligence in his eyes, and when Grail met them he felt was being gauged and, as the eyes moved on, dismissed again. This man had seen battle, spilled blood. The violence in him could almost be smelled. Bardolin of Carreir-ida, Presbyter of the Knights Militant - another enigma. He had been a mage, apprentice to the great Golophin of Hebrion, but had turned against his master and now completed the triumvirate of powers here in Charibon.

‘—Always a pleasure to see the representatives of the Electorates here in Charibon. We trust that your quarters agree with you, and that there will be time during your visit to discuss the many and varied subjects of importance which now concern both our fiefdoms. The Grand Alliance, as it styles itself, has been for years a warlike and threatening presence on our shared continent, and it borders both our states, yet of late its posturing has become more substantial, and we must needs consult together, I believe, as to how its ambitions may be curtailed.’ This was Himerius, his old voice surprisingly clear and resonant under the massive beams of the hall.

‘The restraint shown by the Electorates has been admirable, considering the many hostile acts committed against it by the alliance, but we feel here at Charibon, the seat of the True Faith, that it is perhaps time that Fimbria and the Empire made common cause against these aggressors. The world is divided irrevocably. To our sorrow, our advisors tell us that war may not be long in coming, despite all our efforts to prevent it. The anti-Pontiff Albrec the Faceless and his benefactor, the murderous usurper Corfe of Torunna, not to mention the despicable despoilers of the holy city of Aekir, are all massing troops on our eastern borders. While in the west, Hebrion, Gabrion and Astarac - also in league with the Merduk - blockade our coasts and strangle trade. We pray therefore, Marshal Briannon, that your embassy is come here today to make common cause with us in this approaching struggle - one that will, with God’s blessing, wipe the heresy of Albrec from our shores for ever, and bring to an end the disgusting spectacle of Merduk and Ramusian worshipping together - in the same temple, at the same altar! - as it is said they do in the iniquitous sink that is Torunn.’

Grail blinked in surprise. As diplomatic statements went, this one was as subtle as an onager’s kick. He wanted to glance at Briannon, to see how the Elector had received this speech - nay, this demand - but faced his front rigidly, and kept his face as blank as wood.

‘Your Holiness makes many valuable points’, Briannon replied, his voice hard as basalt after Himerius’s music. ‘Too many in fact to be addressed adequately standing here. As you know, no Fimbrian embassy is ever dispatched lightly, and our presence here is evidence enough that we, also, share your concerns about the current state of affairs on our borders and yours. I will divulge to you that I stand here with the authority to make or break any treaty hitherto entered into by the Electorates. The Treaty of Neyr, guaranteeing Fimbrian neutrality in any war in which the Second Empire might become involved, has served us well over these last twelve years. But times are changing. I rejoice that you and I are of one mind in this respect, Holiness.’

Himerius actually smiled. ‘Shall we adjourn for dinner then, my dear Marshal, and afterwards, perhaps we can meet more informally and begin to explore the new possibilities that this current state of affairs has brought to light?’

Briannon bowed slightly. ‘I am at your Holiness’s disposal.’

‘I had thought Himerius to be a wily negotiator,’ Justus said. ‘He as much as stated we are either for or against him, the old buzzard.’

‘They were not his words,’ Briannon told him. ‘Himerius is a mere figurehead. We are dealing with this Aruan, no other, and he is confident enough of his strength that he thinks to lay down the law to the Electorates.’

‘What will it be then?’ Grail asked impatiently. ‘Are we to throw in our lot with these sorcerers and priests?’

Briannon stared at him coldly. ‘We will do whatever is best for our people, no matter if we have to lay down with the devil to do it.’ The trio of sombrely clad men tramped back to their quarters in silence after that. Grail found himself thinking of his cousin, Silus, who had deserted to Torunna not three weeks before. To serve under a soldier, he had said bitterly. The only real soldier left in the west.

When the doors had boomed shut on the Fimbrians’ retreating backs the three figures on the dais seemed to become animated.

‘We were too obvious’ Himerius said discontentedly. ‘Master, these Fimbrians have the stiffest necks of any men alive. One has to handle them with care, courtesy, flattery.’

They tolerate these things - they do not appreciate them,’

Aruan said. ‘And they are men like any other, fearful of what the future may bring. Our friend Briannon is in fact the same Briannon who is Elector of Neyr, and should the Fimbrians ever set aside their internal differences and decide to raise up an emperor again, then he will be the man clad in imperial purple. He is not here for the exercise. I believe they will sign the new treaty. We will have Fimbrian pike within our ranks yet, I promise you. Not for a while, perhaps, but once Hebrion and Astarac fall, they will see which way the wind is blowing.’

‘They don’t like us,’ Bardolin said. ‘They would prefer to serve under King Corfe - a fighting man.’

‘They would prefer to serve under no one but themselves. However, their rank and file will obey orders. It’s what they’re good at, after all.’ Aruan smiled. ‘My dear Bardolin, you have been very promiscuous in your comings and goings of late. I sometimes regret letting you into the mysteries of the Eighth Discipline. Do I detect a note of sympathy for this soldier-king?’

Bardolin met Aruan’s hawkish gaze without flinching. ‘He’s the greatest general of the age. The Fimbrian rank and file may obey their orders in the main, but over the past fifteen years thousands of them have flocked to his banner.
The Orphans,
they call themselves, and they are fanatics. I’ve met them in the field, and they are a fearsome thing to contend against.’

‘Ah, the Torrin Gap battle,’ Aruan mused. ‘But that was a small affair, and almost ten years ago. We have our own brand of fanatics now, Bardolin, and they laugh at pikes no matter who wields them. Children?
Am I not right?’

At this the monks who stood in the shadows raised their heads, and as their cowls slipped back there were revealed the slavering muzzles of beasts. These opened their maws and howled and yammered, and then crawled forward to fawn at the feet of Aruan, their yellow eyes bright as the flickering flames of the braziers.

Five

The sound came first, a noise like the massed thudding of a thousand heartbeats. The ship’s company roused itself from the exhausted torpor into which it had fallen and stood on deck staring fearfully into the fog. Their officers were no wiser. King Abeleyn stood on the poop in a golden swirling soup gilded by the huge stern lanterns of the
Pontifidad.
Along the gangways of the waist marines were replenishing their slow-match, which had burned down to stubs, and all about the forecastle, waist and quarterdeck the gun crews wiped their faces, spat on their hands and exchanged wordless looks. The beating noise was all around, and growing louder as they stood. Dawn would come in an hour, but something else was coming first.

Admiral Rovero had ordered the swivel-men to remain in the tops, though up there they were on self-contained little islands adrift in an impenetrable grey sea. There was confused shouting from above now, within the fog, and the sudden, shattering bark of the wicked little swivel-guns firing in a formless barrage. Pieces of rope and shards of timber fell to the deck, shot off the yards.

‘It’s begun,’ Abeleyn said.

‘Serjeant Miro!’ Rovero bellowed. ‘Take a section up the shrouds and see what’s going on there.’ And in a lower tone: ‘You, master-at-arms, go get Captain Hawkwood.’

The firing intensified. Miro and his men abandoned their arquebuses and took to the shrouds, disappearing into the fog. All along the packed decks of the ship the crew looked upwards in fearful wonder as the fog began to spin in wild eddies and the shouting turned to screaming. A warm rain began to fall on their faces and a wordless cry went up from the decks as they realised it was raining blood. Then one, two, three - half a dozen bodies were falling down out of the fog, smashing off spars, bouncing from ropes, and thumping in scarlet ruin amid their shipmates below, or splashing overboard into the black sea. The volleyed gunfire sputtered out into a staccato confusion of single shots. Men on the spar decks ducked and dodged as even more dreadful debris rained down from the invisible tops: limbs, entrails, heads, warm spatters of blood. And all the while over the gunfire and the wails of the dying, that drumbeat murmur overhead.

Ashen-faced and panting, Hawkwood joined Abeleyn and Mark on the poop.

‘What in hell’s going on?’

No one answered him. The firing from the tops had all but died, but the shrieking went on, and now men were appearing out of the fog overhead, pouring down the rigging, sliding down backstays so swiftly as to burn the flesh from their hands. It was Abeleyn who first snapped out of the dreamlike paralysis that seemed to have seized all the men on deck.

‘Marines there, fire a volley into the tops. Ensign Gerrolvo, get a grip of your men, for God’s sake! All hands, all hands prepare for boarding! Sergeant-at-arms, issue cutlasses.’

The spell was broken. Given orders to carry out that made sense of the nightmare, the men responded with alacrity. A ragged salvo of arquebus fire was directed towards the swirling mists into which the masts disappeared ten feet above everyone’s heads, and the rest of the mariners raced to the arms barrels to seize close-combat weapons, since it was clear the great guns were useless against whatever was attacking the ship.

On the poop beside Abeleyn, Hawkwood drew his own cutlass and fought the sickening panic that was rising up his throat like a cloud. Almost he mentioned Bardolin’s visitation to the Hebrian King, but then bit back his words.
You’re all dead men.
It was probably too late now anyway.

Admiral Rovero was in the waist, thrusting men to their stations, kicking aside the mutilated corpses which littered the deck. He grasped one mad-eyed marine whose arm looked as though it had been chewed short at the wrist. The man stood grasping his stump and watching the arteries spurt as if they belonged to someone else.

‘Miro, you got up to the maintop, didn’t you? What in the name of God is happening up there?’

‘Demons,’ Miro said wildly. ‘Yellow-eyed fiends. They have wings, Admiral. There’s no one left alive up there.’

The man was in deep shock. Rovero shook him angrily, baffled. ‘Get below to the sickbay. You there - Grode - help him down the hatch. Stand to your weapons, you whoresons. Remember who you are!’

All around them in the wall of mist it was possible to see the red darting flashes of small-arms fire, and seconds later to hear the muted crackle of distant volleys through a far surf of shouting. The other ships of the fleet were enduring a similar assault.

A knot of bodyguards, Hebrian and Astaran, joined Abe-leyn, Mark and Hawkwood at the taffrail with drawn swords. They were in half-armour with open helms, glaring about in bewildered determination. Something swooped out of the fog above them, was lit up saffron as it wheeled into the light of the stern lanterns, and smashed full-tilt into their ranks. The men were sent sprawling like skittles. One was knocked over the ship’s rail and splashed into the sea below without a sound. His armour would sink him like a stone. Hawkwood, in the midst of the tumbling, chaotic flailing of arms and legs and impotently swinging blades, glimpsed a winged shape, featherless as a snake - wickedly swiping claws, a long bald tail like that of a monstrous rat - and then it was gone again, the fog spinning circles in the draughts stirred by its wing-beats.

All the length of the ship, men were fighting off this attack from above. Scores, hundreds of the creatures, were diving down out of the fog, raking mariners and marines to shreds with their wicked talons, and then disappearing again. The masters-at-arms were manning the quarterdeck swivels and indiscriminately blasting the air with wicked showers of metal. Ropes and lines sliced apart by shrapnel came hissing down on the struggling men below; falling blocks and tackle cracking open skulls and adding to the mayhem. Hawkwood saw what must have been the main topgallant yard - thirty feet of stout wood frapped with iron - come searing down like a comet trailing all its attendant rigging and tackle. It speared through the deck and disappeared below, dragging with it two gunners who had been caught up with its lines. The splintered wood of the deck tore their bodies to pieces as they were yanked through it.

‘They’re breaking up the ship from the masts down,’ he cried. ‘We must get men back into the tops or they’ll cripple her.’

He ran forward towards the quarterdeck ladder. Behind him, the two Kings were helping their heavily armoured bodyguards to their feet. Another one of the winged creatures swept low and Hawkwood swiped at it with his iron cutlass, hacking off one of the great talons. It crashed full into the taffrail in a stinking flap of beating bone and leathery wings. The six-foot stern lantern above it shuddered at the impact, tottered, and then fell to the deck in an explosion of flame, burning oil spraying everywhere. King Mark of Astarac was engulfed and transformed into a blazing torch, the bodyguards beside him likewise drenched, roasting inside their armour. Some threw themselves overboard. The King tried to bat out the flames but they rushed hungrily up his body, blackening his skin, withering his hair away, melting his clothes. Dazed, and on fire himself, Hawkwood saw Astarac’s monarch rip the flesh from his own face in his agony. Abeleyn was trying to smother the blaze with his cloak, but it caught too. One of the Hebrian bodyguards pulled his King away and lay on his body, smiting the flames which had caught in his sleeves and hair. Hawkwood rolled across the deck and beat to death the burning droplets on his own clothing. ‘Fire party!’ he shouted. ‘Fire party aft!’ The skin peeled off the back of his hands in perfect sheets and he stared at them, transfixed.