The Second Empire (3 page)

“The gold,” Hawkwood rasped. “Normannic crowns. There was enough of it back there to bribe a king, to hire an army.”

“So he has ambitions, this shifter-wizard of yours,” Murad sneered. “And how exactly do you fit into them, Bardolin?”

“I don’t know, Murad. The Blest Saint help me, I don’t know.”

We will meet again, you and I, and when we do you will know me as your lord, and as your friend
. The parting words of Aruan burnt themselves across Bardolin’s brain. He would never reveal them to anyone. He was his own man, and always would be despite the foulness he now felt at work within him.

“One thing I do know,” he went on. “They are not content to remain here, these shifter-mages. They are going to return to Normannia. Everything I was told confirms it. I believe Aruan intends to make himself a power in the world. In fact he has already begun.”

“If he can make a werewolf of an Inceptine then his words are not idle,” Hawkwood muttered, remembering their outwards voyage and Ortelius, who had spread such terror throughout the ship.

“A race of were-mages,” Murad said. “A man who claims to be centuries old. A network of shifters spread across Normannia spending his gold, running his errands. I would say you were crazed, had I not seen the things I have on this continent. The place is a veritable hell on earth. Hawkwood is right. We must get back to the ship, return to Hebrion, and inform the King. The Old World must be warned. We will root out these monsters from our midst, and then return here with a fleet and an army and wipe them from the face of the earth. They are not so formidable—a taste of iron and they fall dead. We will see what five thousand Hebrian arquebusiers can do here, by God.”

For once, Hawkwood found himself wholly in agreement with the gaunt nobleman. Bardolin seemed troubled, however.

“What’s wrong now?” he asked the wizard. “You don’t approve of this Aruan’s ambitions, do you?”

“Of course not. But it was a purge of the Dweomer-folk which drove him and his kind here in the first place. I know what Murad’s proposal will lead to, Hawkwood. A vast, continent-wide purge of my people such as has never been seen before. They will be slaughtered in their thousands, the innocent along with the guilty. We will drive all of Normannia’s mages into Aruan’s arms. That is exactly what he wants. And his agents will not be so easy to uncover at any rate. They could be anyone—even the nobility. We will persecute the innocent while the guilty bide their time.”

“The plain soldiers of the world will take their chances,” Murad retorted. “There is no place on this earth for your kind any more, Bardolin. They are an abomination. Their end has been coming for a long time. This is only hastening the inevitable.”

“You are right there at least,” the wizard murmured.

“Whose side are you on?” Hawkwood asked the mage. Bardolin looked angry.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that Murad is right. There is a time coming, Bardolin, when it will be your Dweomer-folk ranged against the ordinary people of the world, and you will have to either abet their destruction or stand with them against us. That is what I mean.”

“It will not—it must not—come to that!” the mage protested.

Hawkwood was about to go on when Murad halted him with a curt gesture.

“Enough. Look around you. The odds are that we will never have to worry about such things, and we’ll leave our bones to fester here in the jungle. Wizard, I’ll offer you a truce. We three must help each other if any of us is ever to get back to the coast. The debates of high policy can wait until we are aboard ship. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Bardolin said, his mouth a bitter line in his face.

“Excellent.” The irony in Murad’s voice was palpable. “Now, Captain, you are our resident navigator. Can you point us in the right direction tomorrow?”

“Perhaps. If I can get a look at the sun before the clouds start building up. There is a better way, though. We must make an inventory. Empty your pouches. I must see what we have to work with.”

They tore a broad leaf from a nearby bush and upon it they placed the contents of their pockets and pouches, squinting in the firelight. Bardolin and Hawkwood both had waterproofed tinderboxes with flint and steel and little coils of dry wool inside. The wizard also had a bronze pocketknife and a pewter spoon. Murad had a broken iron knife blade some five inches long, a tiny collapsible tin cup and a cork water-bottle still hanging from his belt by its straps. Hawkwood had his needle, a ball of tough yarn, a lead arquebus bullet and a fishhook of carved bone. All of them had broken pieces of ship’s biscuit lining their pockets and Murad a small lump of dried pork which was hard as wood and inedible.

“A meagre enough store, by God,” the nobleman said. “Well, Hawkwood, what wonders can you work with it?”

“I can make a compass, I think, and we can do some fishing and hunting if we have to also. I was shipwrecked when I was a boy in the Malacars, and we had little more than this upon us when we were washed up. We can use the yarn as fishing line, weight it with the bullet and bait it with the pork. The blade we can tie to a stave for a spear. There’s fruit all around us too. We won’t starve, but it’s a time-consuming business forageing for food, even in the jungle. We’d best be prepared to tighten our belts if we’re to get back to the coast before the spring.”

“The spring!” Murad exclaimed. “Great God, we may have to eat our boots, but we’ll be back at the fort before that!”

“We were almost a month coming here, Murad, and we travelled along a road for much of the way. The journey back will be harder. Maybe they did allow us to escape, but I still don’t want to frequent their highways.” He remembered the heat and stink of the great werewolf lying beside him in the brush, back inside the mountain—

Would I harm you, Captain, the navigator, the steerer of ships? I think not. I think not
.

— And shuddered at the memory.

T HEY stood watches that first night, taking it in turns to feed the fire and stare out at the black wall of the rainforest. When they were not on guard they slept fitfully. Bardolin lay awake most of the night, exhausted but afraid to sleep, afraid to find out what might be lurking in his dreams.

Aruan had made a lycanthrope of him.

So the arch-mage had said. Bardolin had had sexual relations with Kersik, the girl who had guided them to Undabane. And then she had fed him a portion of her kill—that was the process. That was the rite which engendered the disease.

He almost thought he could feel the black disease working in him, a physical process changing body and soul with every heartbeat. Should he tell the others? They distrusted him already. What was going to happen to him? What manner of thing was he to become?

He considered just walking off and becoming lost to the jungle, or even returning to Undi like some prodigal son. But he had always been stubborn, proud and stiff-necked. He would resist this thing, battle it for as long as there was any remnant of Bardolin son of Carnolan left in him. He had been a soldier once: he would fight to the very end.

Thus he thought as he sat his watch, and fed the fire while the other two slept. Hawkwood had given him a task: he was to rub the iron needle with wool from one of the tinderboxes. It made little sense to Bardolin, but at least it was something to help keep sleep at bay.

To one side, Murad moaned in his slumber, and once to his shock Bardolin thought he heard the nobleman gasp out Griella’s name—the base-born lover Murad had taken aboard ship who had turned out to be a shifter herself. What unholy manner of union had those two shared? Not rape, not love freely given either. A kind of mutual degradation which wrought violence upon their sensibilities and yet somehow left them wanting more.

And Bardolin, the old man, he had been envious of them.

He sat and excoriated himself for a thousand failings, the regrets of an ageing man without home or family. In the black night the darkness of his mood deepened. Why had Aruan let him go? What was his fate to be? Ah, to hell with the endless questions.

He spun himself a little cantrip, a glede of werelight which flickered and spluttered weakly. In sudden fear he sent it bobbing around the limits of the firelight, banishing shadows for a few fleeting seconds. It wheeled like an ecstatic firefly and then went out. Too soon. Too weak. He felt like a man who has lost a limb and yet feels pain in phantom fingers. He drank some water from Murad’s bottle, eyes smarting with grief and tyredness. He was too old for this. He should have an apprentice, someone to help bear the load of a greybeard’s worries. Like young Orquil perhaps, whom they had sent to the fire back in Abrusio.

What about me, Bardolin? Will I do?

He started. Sleep had almost taken him. For a moment he had half seen another person sitting on the other side of the fire. A young girl with heavy bronze-coloured hair. The night air had invaded his head. He brutally knuckled his aching eye-sockets and resumed his solitary vigil, impatiently awaiting the dawn.

T HEY were on their feet with the first faint light of the sun through the canopy. Water from the stream and a few broken crumbs of biscuit constituted breakfast, and then they looked over Hawkwood’s shoulder as he set the needle floating on a leaf in Murad’s tin cup. It twisted strangely on the water therein, and then steadied. The mariner nodded with grim satisfaction.

“That’s your compass?” Murad asked incredulously. “A common needle?”

“Any iron can be given the ability to turn to the north,” he was told. “I don’t know why or how, but it works. We march south-east today. Murad, I want you to look out for a likely spear shaft. Myself, I reckon I might have a go at making a bow. Give me your knife, Bardolin. We’ll have to blaze trees to keep our bearing. All right? Then let’s go.”

Rather nonplussed, Hawkwood’s two companions fell into step behind him, and the trio was on its way.

They tramped steadily until noon, when it began to cloud over in preparation for the almost daily downpour. By that time Murad had his iron knife blade tied on to a stout shaft some six feet long, and Hawkwood was laden with a selection of slender sticks and one stave as thick as three fingers. They were famished, pocked with countless bites, scored and gashed and dripping with leeches. And Murad was finding it difficult to keep the pace Hawkwood set. The mariner and the mage would often have to pause in their tracks and wait for him to catch up. But when Hawkwood suggested a break, the nobleman only snarled at him.

In the shelter of an enormous dead tree they waited out the bruising rain as it began thundering in torrents down from the canopy overhead. The ground they sat on quickly became a sucking mire, and the force of the downpour made it difficult to breathe. Hawkwood bent his chin into his breast to create a space, a pocket of air, and in that second it filled with mosquitoes which he drew in helplessly as he breathed, and spat and coughed out again.

The deluge finally ended as abruptly as it had begun, and for a few minutes afterwards they sat in the mud and gurgling water which the forest floor had become, sodden, weary, frail with hunger. Murad was barely conscious, and Hawkwood could feel the burning heat of his body as the nobleman leaned against him.

They laboured to their feet without speaking, staggering like ancients. A coral-bright snake whipped through the puddles at their feet, and with a cry Murad seemed to come alive. He stabbed his new spear at the ground and transfixed the thrashing reptile just behind the head. It twined itself about the spear in its last agony, and Murad smiled.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “dinner is served.”

TWO

H APTMAN Hernan Sequero surveyed the squalid extent of his little kingdom and pursed his lips in disapproval. He rap-rap-rapped his knuckles lightly on the hardwood table, ignoring the bead of sweat that was hovering from one eye-brow.

“It’s not good enough,” he said. “We’ll never be self-sufficient here if these damned people keep on dying. They’re supposed to be blasted magicians, after all. Can’t they magick up something?”

The men around him cleared their throats, shifted on their feet or looked away. Only one made any attempt to reply, a florid, golden-haired young man with an ensign’s bar at his collar.

“There are three herbalists amongst the colonists, sir. They’re doing their best, but the plants here are unfamiliar to them. It is a process of trial and error.”

“And in the meantime the cemetrey becomes our most thriving venture ashore,” Sequero retorted drily. “Very well, one cannot argue with nature I suppose, but it is vexing. When Lord—when his excellency—returns he will not be pleased. Not at all.”

Again, the uneasy shuffling of feet, brief shared glances.

There were three men standing about the table besides Sequero, all in the leather harness of the Hebrian soldiery. They were in one of the tall watchtowers which stood at each corner of the palisaded fort. Up here it was possible to catch a breath of air off the ocean, and in fact to see their ship, the
Gabrian Osprey
, as it rode at anchor scarcely half a mile away, the horizon beyond it a far blur of sea and sky at the edge of sight.

Closer to, the view was less inspiring. Peppering the two acres or so which the palisade enclosed were dozens of rude huts, some little better than piled-up mounds of brush. The only substantial building was the Governor’s residence, a large timbre structure which was half villa and half blockhouse.

A deep ditch bisected the fort and served the community as a sewer, running off into the jungle. It was bridged in several places with felled trees, and the ground around it was a foul-smelling swamp swarming with mosquitoes. They had dug wells, but these were all brackish, so they continued to take their water from the clear stream Murad had discovered on the first day. One corner of the fort was corralled off and within it resided the surviving horses. Another few days would see it empty. When the last beasts had died they would be salted down and eaten, like the others.

“Fit for neither man nor beast,” Sequero muttered, brow dark as he thought of the once magnificent creatures he had brought from Hebrion, the cream of his father’s studs. Even the sheep did not do well here. Were it not for the wild pigs and deer which hunting parties brought out of the jungle every few days, they would be gnawing on roots and berries by now.